Boredom’s Metamorphosis: Robert Venturi and Saul Steinberg

Andreea Margareta Mihalache

Dissertation submitted to the faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

In

Architecture and Design Research

Paul Emmons, Chair Marcia Feuerstein Jaan Holt Amy Kulper

April 16, 2018 Alexandria, Virginia

Keywords: Architecture; Boredom; Midcentury; Robert Venturi; Saul Steinebrg

© 2018 by Andreea Margareta Mihalache

Boredom’s Metamorphosis: Robert Venturi and Saul Steinberg

Andreea Margareta Mihalache

ABSTRACT

My dissertation investigates questions of boredom and architecture in the middle decades of the twentieth century through the work of two figures: the American-Italian architect Robert Venturi (b. 1925) and the Romanian-born American architect and artist Saul Steinberg (1914- 1999). The topic of boredom in architecture, and specifically within this timeframe, has been largely ignored in architectural history, theory, and criticism where, with the exception of a few articles, there is no consistent body of scholarship on this issue. Looming large in the sterile iterations of various –isms, boredom remains critical in contemporary architectural practice as the production and obsolescence of images becomes ever faster with new technologies. Quickly saturated with information presented in fleeting displays that are easy to produce, easy to delete, and easy to consume, as soon as our expectation for novelty and change fails to satisfy us, we fall back into the loop of boredom. While boredom as the dissociation of person from place has raised architects’ interest especially during the middle decades of the twentieth century, there is no significant scholarship on this topic. In this context, my research looks at the work of two architects who go beyond the attractive rhetoric of boredom and explore its potential as both a critical and a generative tool.

Boredom’s Metamorphosis: Robert Venturi and Saul Steinberg

Andreea Margareta Mihalache

GENERAL AUDIENCE ABSTRACT

My dissertation investigates questions of boredom and architecture in the middle decades of the twentieth century through the work of two figures: the American-Italian architect Robert Venturi (b. 1925) and the Romanian-born American architect and artist Saul Steinberg (1914- 1999). Although the topic of boredom as a disease of modernity has been studied in various fields, such as philosophy, literary studies, sociology, and visual arts, it does not have a presence in architectural scholarship. We live in a world where images are short lived, their production and obsolescence becomes faster with new technologies, and we become quickly bored with everything. In this context, boredom remains critical in contemporary architectural practice where we are quickly saturated with information presented in fleeting displays that are easy to produce, easy to delete, and easy to consume. As soon as our expectation for novelty and change fails to satisfy us, we fall back into the loop of boredom. My research looks at the work of two architects who go beyond the rhetoric of boredom and explore its potential both as a tool of criticism and as a design tool.

DEDICATION

To Luca and my parents, cu dragoste nemăsurată

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation has been closer to a personal journey than I would have ever imagined. It has been written over several years, in several places: a living room facing a quiet backyard in Brookland, Washington, D.C.; the Ph.D. student offices at the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center; our family house in Bucharest, between two peach trees; the main reading room at the Library of Congress; an office with a lavish porch at Mississippi State University; the Lee Hall “Tower” at Clemson University looking at the often troubled skies of the South; and, finally, nello studiolo of our rental house in Central, SC.

During all these years and in all these places, I would have never accomplished anything without the support, patience, and love of all the people who stood by me. This work owes everything to their friendship and unconditioned trust. I thank my committee members for their guidance, knowledge, and humanity. In her graceful and elegant manner, Dr. Marcia Feurestein has the incredibly strong gift of asking the right question at the right time and thus moving the research forward. By weaving together seemingly loose threads into an unexpected wondrous fabric, Dr. Amy Kulper has shown me how to construct meaning from conventional facts. With his infinite wisdom doubled by an infinite heart, Jaan Holt has magically made things possible at times when nothing seemed possible anymore. His larger than life personality belongs to mythology rather than ordinary life. Dr. Paul Emmons, my committee chair, continues to be a mentor and has become a friend. His ingegno operates at levels inaccessible to ordinary minds. With intuition and intelligence, he crafts not only future scholars, but perhaps more importantly, robust individuals. Entering the program, I did not know I would come out a different person.

I wish to extend my thanks to Kate Schwennsen, Director of Clemson School of Architecture, a role model and inspiring leader, and to all my colleagues for welcoming me with open hearts. They all make the school an incredible and inspiring place.

My gratitude goes to my friends. Dr. Sheila Schwartz, Research and Archives Director at The Saul Steinberg Foundation, is constantly helping me untangle the intricate threads of Steinberg’s life and work. Her discipline and rigor are exemplary, her knowledge, overwhelming, and her warm friendship, exquisite. I thank Berrin for her infectious laugh, and more importantly, for putting up with me during the last months of writing. My dear friends

v

Cristina and Vijay have stood by me in the thick and the thin. I thank Vijay for bringing spices into my life and for always staying calm in troubled waters. Cristina’s beautiful mind, honesty, and warmth are like no other. I hope she will always know what she means to me and that I am forever grateful for being part of her world. If someone is truly “responsible” for my finishing the work, it is my dear friend Muey, who patiently kept me from drifting away. The immense generosity, with which she fits the entire world in her tiny frame, is humbling. Anca and Virgil Nemoianu have become my family away from home, offering the unconditioned support that one only finds in the closest kin. My warmest and more sincere thoughts go to the Stavropoleos community in Bucharest, for their joy and wit, along with their reassuring presence that make the world a better place. Special thanks to my cousin Camelia, for her sharp humor, intelligence, kindness, and for always showing me the right way to cross the street.

Over the years, my family has seen the doings and undoings of my life and work. My parents have watched me come, go, then leave again. Never a reproach, never a question. They are stronger, braver, and more forgiving than anyone I know. Without their love, I would be lost in an abyss. Finally, meeting my husband Luca was the most unexpected gift. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. To him and my parents this work is dedicated.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ii

General Audience Abstract iii

Dedication iv

Acknowledgments v

List of Figures ix

Preface xxiii

Chapter 1: Between Boredom and Habitus 1

1.1. Learning from habitus and behaviorism 2

1.2. Boredom in midcentury architectural thought 47

1.3. Less is a bore. 64

Figures 81

First Interlude: Boredom and Dor 92

Chapter 2: Between Boredom and Flatness 133

2.1. Learning from the Quakers 135

2.2. Boredom and midcentury billboards 158

2.3. More is not less. 172

Figures 198

Second Interlude: Boredom and (Day)dreaming 215

vii

Chapter 3: Between the Boring and the Interesting 231 3.1. Learning from the interesting 234

3.2. Boredom and midcentury visual arts 263

3.3. Is boring architecture interesting? 274

Figures 311

Postface: “A Quietly Seen Unseen” 318

Figures 323

Bibliography 325

viii

LIST OF FIGURES

CHAPTER 1

Figure 1.1. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, “I am a monument,” 1972. Public domain.

Figure 1.2. Excerpt from Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st ed., 1966, p.22-23.

Figure 1.3. Excerpt from Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st ed., 1966, p.30-31.

Figure 1.4. Excerpt from Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st ed., 1966, p.82-83.

Figure 1.5. Excerpt from Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st ed., 1966, p. 28.

Figure 1.6. Excerpt from Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st ed., 1966, p. 37.

Figure 1.7. Excerpt from Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st ed., 1966, p. 40.

Figure 1.8. Excerpt from Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st ed., 1966, p. 41.

Figure 1.9. Venturi and Short, Grand’s restaurant, Philadelphia, 1961-62. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 1.10. Venturi and Short, Grand’s restaurant, Philadelphia, 1961-62. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

ix

Figure 1.11. Venturi and Short, Grand’s restaurant, Philadelphia, 1961-62. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 1.12. Venturi and Short, Grand’s restaurant, Philadelphia, 1961-62. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 1.13. Venturi and Short, Grand’s restaurant, Philadelphia, 1961-62. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 1.14. Venturi and Short, Grand’s restaurant, Philadelphia, 1961-62. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 1.15. Venturi and Short, Grand’s restaurant, Philadelphia, 1961-62. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 1.16. Venturi and Rauch, Gerod Clark and Arthur Jones, Copley Square Competition Entry, 1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 1.17. Venturi and Rauch, Gerod Clark and Arthur Jones, Copley Square Competition Entry, 1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 1.18. Venturi and Rauch, Gerod Clark and Arthur Jones, Copley Square Competition Entry, 1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 1.19. Venturi and Rauch, Gerod Clark and Arthur Jones, Copley Square Competition Entry, 1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

x

Figure 1.20. Venturi and Rauch: Vanna Venturi House, 1966; North Penn Visiting Nurse Association, 1960. Public domain.

Figure 1.21. Robert Venturi, Trubek House, 1972. Public domain.

Figure 1.22. Venturi and Scott Brown, BASCO Showroom, 1976. Public domain.

Figure 1.23. Venturi and Scott Brown, BEST Products Catalog Showroom, 1978. Public domain.

Figure 1.24. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Shore, Signs of Life exhibition, 1976. Public domain.

Figure 1.25. Charles Moore, House, 1961. Progressive Architecture, January 1962.

Figure 1.26. Charles Colbert, Riverdale Country School for Girls. Progressive Architecture, January 1965.

Figure 1.27. Venturi and Rauch, Frug House, 1966. Progressive Architecture, January 1967.

Figure 1.28. Venturi and Rauch, Three buildings for a town in Ohio, 1965. Progressive Architecture, January 1967.

Figure 1.29. Venturi and Rauch, Princeton Memorial Park, 1966. Progressive Architecture, January 1967.

Figure 1.30. Robert Venturi, page from a working draft of the manuscript for Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 1.31. Venturi and Rauch, Three buildings for a town in Ohio, 1965. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 1.32. Venturi and Rauch, Three buildings for a town in Ohio, 1965. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

xi

Figure 1.33. Venturi and Rauch, Three buildings for a town in Ohio, 1965. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 1.34. Venturi and Rauch, Three buildings for a town in Ohio, 1965. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

FIRST INTERLUDE

Figure I.1. Steinberg’s drawing of his childhood street in Bucharest, from a journal, December 1940-January 1943; Saul Steinberg Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.2. Steinberg’s drawing of his childhood street in Bucharest, from a journal, December 1940-January 1943; Saul Steinberg Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.3. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1942. Ink, pencil, and watercolor on paper, 37.8 x 55.2 cm. The Saul Steinberg Foundation, New York. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.4. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor, gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 x 73.7 cm; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America-Israel Cultural Foundation; Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.5. Photographs of Strada Palas. Unknown author. Saul Steinberg Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.6. Postcards from Romania. Saul Steinberg Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

xii

Figure I.7. Copies of maps of Bucharest. Saul Steinberg Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.8. Steinberg’s drawing of his childhood street in Bucharest, from a journal, December 1940-January 1943; Saul Steinberg Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.9. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Detail. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor, gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 x 73.7 cm; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America-Israel Cultural Foundation; Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.10. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Detail. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor, gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 x 73.7 cm; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America-Israel Cultural Foundation; Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.11. Saul Steinberg. Collage of himself as a child and an adult. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.12. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Detail. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor, gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 x 73.7 cm; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America-Israel Cultural Foundation; Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.13. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Detail. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor, gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 x 73.7 cm; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America-Israel Cultural Foundation; Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.14. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Detail. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor, gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 x 73.7 cm; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America-Israel Cultural Foundation; Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

xiii

Figure I.15. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Detail. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor, gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 x 73.7 cm; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America-Israel Cultural Foundation; Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.16. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Detail. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor, gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 x 73.7 cm; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America-Israel Cultural Foundation; Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.17. Steinberg’s drawing of his childhood street in Bucharest, from a journal, December 1940-January 1943. Detail. Saul Steinberg Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.18. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1942. Detail. Ink, pencil, and watercolor on paper, 37.8 x 55.2 cm. The Saul Steinberg Foundation, New York. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.19. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Detail. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor, gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 x 73.7 cm; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America-Israel Cultural Foundation; Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

CHAPTER 2

Figure 2.1. Venturi and Rauch, Plan of Vanna Venturi House, 1966. Public domain.

Figure 2.2. Venturi and Rauch, Cope and Lippincott, Plan of Guild House, 1960-1963. Public domain.

Figure 2.3. Venturi and Short, Plan of North Penn Visiting Nurse Association, 1960. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

xiv

Figure 2.4. Interior of the Arch Street Friends Meeting House, Phildelphia. Public domain.

Figure 2.5. Venturi and Rauch, Cope and Lippincott, Guild House: sign on the façade, 1960- 1963. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.6. Venturi and Short, Grand’s Restaurant: sign on the façade, 1962. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.7. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, National Football Hall of Fame: sign on the façade, 1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.8. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Franklin Court, 1976. Public domain.

Figure 2.9. Edward Hicks, Painting in the Peaceable Kingdoms Series, 1825-1830. Public domain.

Figure 2.10. Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom of the Branch, 1825. Public domain.

Figure 2.11. Edward Hicks, Detail of The Peaceable Kingdoms with Quakers Bearing Banner, 1826. Public domain.

Figure 2.12. Quaker Silhouettes, 18th-19th centuries. Public domain.

Figure 2.13. Gilles-Louis Chretien, Drawing for a physiognotrace, 1786. Public domain.

Figure 2.14. Albums of Quaker Silhouettes. Public domain.

Figure 2.15. Venturi and Scott Brown, Knoll Chairs, c. 1984. Public domain.

Figure 2.16. Venturi and Scott Brown, The Queen Ann Chair, c. 1984. Public domain.

Figure 2.17. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, National Football Hall of Fame competition entry, 1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

xv

Figure 2.18. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Extension of the Allen Art Museum, Oberlin College, 1973. Public domain.

Figure 2.19. Metal structure of a contemporary billboard. Public domain.

Figure 2.20. Interactive display for Johnson and Johnson’s Sundown line of tanning products. Public domain.

Figure 2.21. Still frame from Leave It to Beaver! Public domain.

Figure 2.22. Still frame from Leave It to Beaver! Public domain.

Figure 2.23. Scented billboard in Mooresville, NC. Public domain.

Figure 2.24. Ed Ruscha, Actual Size, 1962. Public domain.

Figure 2.25. Contemporary billboard. Public domain.

Figure 2.26. Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966. Public domain.

Figure 2.27. Robert Venturi, Thesis Project: Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.28. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, National Football Hall of Fame competition entry, 1967. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.29. Venturi and Rauch, Cope and Lippincott, Guild House, 1963-1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.30. Robert Venturi, School project for a Roman Catholic Church, undated. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.31. Robert Venturi, Thesis Project: Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. xvi

Figure 2.32. Robert Venturi, Thesis Project: Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.33. Robert Venturi, Thesis Project: Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.34. Robert Venturi, Thesis Project: Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.35. Robert Venturi, Thesis Project: Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.36. Interior of a contemporary Quaker Meeting House. Public domain.

Figure 2.37. Robert Venturi, Thesis Project: Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.38. Robert Venturi, Thesis Project: Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.39. Robert Venturi, Thesis Project: Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.40. Robert Venturi, Thesis Project: Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.41. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Episcopal Academy Chapel, 2008. Public domain.

xvii

Figure 2.42. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Episcopal Academy Chapel, 2008. Public domain.

Figure 2.43. Venturi and Rauch, Scott Brown, FDR Memorial Park Competition, 1960. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.44. Venturi and Rauch, Scott Brown, Philadelphia Fairmount Park, 1964. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.45. Venturi and Rauch, Gerod Clark and Arthur Jones, Copley Square Competition Entry, 1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.46. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, National Football Hall of Fame competition entry, 1967. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.47. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, National Football Hall of Fame competition entry, 1967. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.48. Still frame from the sitcom My Favorite Martian, 1963-66. Public domain.

Figure. 2.49. Opening frame of the sitcom Bewitched, 1964-1972. Public domain.

Figure. 2.50. Richard Hamilton, Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Home so Different, so Appealing?, 1954. Public domain.

Figure 2.51. Venturi and Rauch, Cope and Lippincott, Guild House, 1963-1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.52. Venturi and Rauch, Cope and Lippincott, Guild House, 1963-1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. xviii

Figure 2.53. Philibert de l’Orme, Anet Castle, 1547 to 1552. Public domain.

Figure 2.54. Philibert de l’Orme, Anet Castle, 1547 to 1552. Public domain.

Figure 2.55. Richard Lippold, Installation for the lobby of the Pan American World Airways, New York, 1963. Public domain.

Figure 2.56. MetLife Building, formerly Pan American World Airways, New York, 1963. Public domain.

Figure 2.57. Richard Lippold: Variation with a Sphere, No.10: The Sun (1953-56); Bird of Paradise #3 (1964); Ad Astra (1976); Ex Stasis (1988). Public domain.

Figure 2.58. Venturi and Rauch, Cope and Lippincott, Drawings for the antenna on the Guild House, 1963-1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.59. Venturi and Rauch, Cope and Lippincott, Drawings for the antenna on the Guild House, 1963-1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

SECOND INTERLUDE

Figure II.1. Saul Steinberg. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure II.2. Saul Steinberg. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure II.3. Saul Steinberg, Untitled sketch, 1943-1944. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure II.4. Saul Steinberg, Drawing from the portfolio “The Coast,” The New Yorker, January 27, 1951. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure II.5. Rachel Whiteread, Ghost, 1990. Photos by the author.

xix

Figure II.6. Saul Steinberg. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure II.7. Saul Steinberg. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure II.8. Walter Sicker, L’Ennui, 1914. Public domain.

Figure II.9. Saul Steinberg. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure II.10. Saul Steinberg. Drawing from a series made as an artist-in-residence at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1967.

Figure II.11. Saul Steinberg. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure II.12. Saul Steinberg. Cover for The New Yorker, May 25, 1963. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

CHAPTER 3

Figure 3.1. Jasper John, Three Flags, 1958. Public domain.

Figure 3.2. Robert Morris, Untitled (Brown Felt), 1973. Public domain.

Figure 3.3. Claes Oldenburg, Work from The Store, 1961. Public domain.

Figure 3.4. Robert Venturi, Pearson House, 1957, from Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed., 1972, p.106.

Figure 3.5. Venturi, Cope and Lippincott, Renovation of the J. B. Duke House (1957), from Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed., 1972, p.107.

Figure 3.6. Venturi and Short, North Penn Visiting Nurse Association, 1960. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

xx

Figure 3.7. Venturi and Rauch, Cope and Lippincott, Guild House, 1963-1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 3.8. Venturi and Rauch, Vanna Venturi House, 1962, Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 3.9. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, National Football Hall of Fame, 1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 3.10. Nicholas Hawksmoor, St. George Church, Bloomsbury, London. Public domain.

Figure 3.11. Ste. Madeleine, Vezelay, from Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed., 1972, p. 46.

Figure. 3.12. Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, from Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed., 1972, p. 20.

Figure. 3.13. Louis Kahn, Goldenberg House, from Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed., 1972, p. 51.

Figure 3.14. Venturi and Short, North Penn Visiting Nurse Association, elevation studies, 1960. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 3.15. Venturi and Rauch, Three buildings for a town in Ohio, 1965. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 3.16. Venturi and Rauch, Gerod Clark and Arthur Jones, Copley Square Competition Entry, 1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

xxi

Figure 3.17. Venturi and Rauch, Gerod Clark and Arthur Jones, Copley Square Competition Entry, 1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 3.18. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Comparison between Paul Rudolph’s Crawford Manor and Robert Venturi’s Guild House, from Learning from Las Vegas, 2nd ed., 1977.

Figure 3.19. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Comparison between Paul Rudolph’s Crawford Manor and Robert Venturi’s Guild House, from Learning from Las Vegas, 2nd ed., 1977.

CONCLUSIONS

Figure 4.1. BIG, The Mountain, 2008. Public domain.

Figure 4.2. BIG, The Infinity Loop, 2010. Public domain.

Figure 4.3. BIG, Vejle Housing (Urban Typography), 2003. Public domain.

Figure 4.4. BIG, VMCP Hotel, 2011. Public domain.

Figure 4.5. Alberto Campo Baeza, Domus Aurea, 2015. Public domain.

Figure 4.6. Naoto Fukasawa and Jasper Morrison, Super Normal, 2006-2009. Public domain.

Figure 4.7. John Pawson, Okinawa House, 2013-2016. Public domain.

Figure 4.8. John Pawson, Spectrum, 2016. Public domain.

xxii

Preface

Ennui. Langeweile. Acedia. Tedium: what do we talk about when we talk about boredom? A pathological condition (Otto Fenichel), a mood conducive to philosophy (Martin Heidegger), “a warm gray fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful of silks” (Walter Benjamin), “a kind of bliss that is almost unearthly” (Sigfried Kracauer), the concept of boredom emerges and is intertwined with modernity. It has been closely examined in philosophy and aesthetics (Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Sigfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin), social sciences (Otto Fenichel, Orin Klapp, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), critical theory and literary studies (Patricia Meyer Sacks, Elizabeth Goodstein, Reinhard Kuhn, Sianne Ngai), and visual arts (Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Jonathan Flatley, Tom McDonough, Julian Jason Haladyn). However, in architecture boredom has remained ambiguous, vague, barely defined, and rarely acknowledged, and nothing qualified as boring deserves further attention.

My study investigates questions of boredom and architecture in the middle decades of the twentieth century through the work of two figures: the American-Italian architect Robert Venturi (b. 1925) and the Romanian-born American architect and artist Saul Steinberg (1914-1999). The topic of boredom in architecture, and specifically within this timeframe, has been largely ignored in architectural history, theory, and criticism where, with the exception of a few articles, there is no consistent body of scholarship on this issue. Looming large in the sterile iterations of various –isms, boredom remains critical in contemporary architectural practice as the production and obsolescence of images becomes ever faster with new technologies. Quickly saturated with information presented in fleeting displays that are easy to produce, easy to delete, and easy to consume, as soon as our expectation for novelty and change fails to satisfy us, we fall back into the loop of boredom.

While boredom as the dissociation of person from place has raised architects’ interest especially during the middle decades of the twentieth century, there is no significant scholarship on this topic. A few glimpses into architectural writings show that those architects who touched

xxiii

on the topic of boredom have disregarded its intrinsic significance and approached it mostly as a stylistic trope to draw attention to other, more significant issues.

Shortly after the first use of the word boredom in English in Charles Dickens’s 1853 book The Bleak House, architecture professor Adolf Göller delivered a talk in 1887 at the Technische Hochshule in Stuttgart in which he offered a hypothesis for style changes in architecture. Göller was mainly concerned with the formation of styles and the invention of architectural forms, which he saw as a cyclical process based on what he called “the law of jading:” as people become more familiar with certain forms, the style is exhausted and eventually becomes obsolete. What he described as the “law of jading” was the recognition of boredom as a link between architectural forms and human beings.

A few decades later, Le Corbusier, unknowingly reinforcing Göller’s deterministic argument, proposed new paradigms of inhabitation and identified the sources of contemporary boredom. In Towards an Architecture, he described how the unsuitable living conditions of present-day dwellings spawned the tedium that was driving men and women away from their houses. In the late 1940s, the Austrian architect Josef Frank put forward the concept of accidentism as an instrument to combat the dullness of mass produced architecture and the monotony ensued from modernist laws turned normative. First published in 1963, Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander’s Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanism described the “fundamental monotony” and “anxiety-ridden existence” of the modern man in terms of its lack of daily variety, contemplation, and introspection. As “more and more becomes less and less,” overstimulation leads to boredom, a disease whose pathology they identified in the proliferation of artificial, machine-controlled environments. Summarizing the state-of-affairs in architecture during the mid-decades of the twentieth century, in his introduction to the 1967 edition of Space, Time, and Architecture, Sigfried Giedion defined it as “Confusion and Boredom:” “In the sixties a certain confusion exists in contemporary architecture, as in painting; a kind of pause, even a kind of exhaustion. […] A kind of playboy- architecture became en vogue: an architecture treated as playboys treat life, jumping from one sensation to another and quickly bored with everything.”

In this context, my research looks at the work of two architects who go beyond the attractive rhetoric of boredom and explore its potential as both a critical and a generative tool. xxiv

Psychologist Orin Klapp has proposed that the increased use of the word boredom between 1931 and 1961 indicates a growing awareness of this particular mood in modern society. In the aftermath of World War II, when the discipline of architecture was redefining its goals and mission, Robert Venturi, and Saul Steinberg proposed and exercised alternative modes of practice and criticism through rhetorical building (Venturi), and critical drawing (Steinberg). By expanding the boundaries of the field, they also challenged conventional notions about what constitutes architectural scholarship. Both of them, under different forms and in different contexts, specifically addressed the issue of boredom. The starting points of my inquiries is Venturi’s famous, but unexamined, quip Less is a bore (1965-1966).

Despite their education as architects, canonical historiography would place Venturi, and Steinberg under different labels and even different disciplines. It was only Venturi, in tandem with his wife and partner Denise Scott Brown, who maintained an active architectural office. Steinberg never worked as a practicing professional. From a disciplinary perspective, he would hardly be considered an architect – building his fame and reputation as a visual artist widely published in The New Yorker and many other magazines and journals (including architectural ones), Steinberg produced a broad range of artifacts from drawings, collages, and photomontages to murals, advertising art, fabric design, and stage sets. A visual storyteller, he described himself as a writer and, despite the lack of a consistent body of written work, his interviews, personal notes, and journal entries, reveal the same wit, imagination, and critical view as his drawings.

Venturi, on the other hand, although has always described himself as a practicing architect, became known first as an architectural writer. He had been working and teaching for several years when his 1966 treatise, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, truly put his name at the forefront of the profession. Famously described by Vincent Scully as “probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture, of 1923,”1 the book most certainly played a significant role in the public recognition of Venturi’s practice. The year following its publication, the architectural journal Progressive Architecture officially acknowledged the work coming from the firm of Venturi and Rauch. For the 1967 P/A Annual Awards, they received one award (for the Frug House) and two

1 Vincent Scully, “Introduction,” in Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 9. xxv

citations (for the Princeton Memorial Park and three buildings for the city of North Canton, Ohio, the latter addressing directly the issue of boredom).

While Venturi glorified consumerism in its various forms, Steinberg constantly challenged it. In spite of their obvious and sometimes irreconcilable differences, Venturi, and Steinberg are nevertheless connected through multiple threads. Bringing them together sheds new light on the changing nature of the discipline during midcentury and the role boredom played in their own work, as well as in the evolution of the profession at large. What they have in common is also what shapes their shared interest in boredom.

Despite their unquestioned success, both Venturi and Steinberg deliberately positioned themselves at the periphery of the profession, a necessary move for gaining freedom from norms, as well as the distance to act critically. Capitalizing on their foreign origins (Venturi was of Italian descent and Steinberg was born in Romania), both of them had to create a public persona in order to become relevant in the intellectual, not just architectural, world they aspired to belong to.

They shared a consistent curiosity for the everyday and the ordinary of popular culture, most likely originating in their extensive travels around the world. Venturi recognized that his time in Italy and Europe as a fellow of the American Academy in Rome had a decisive influence on his view on architecture. Beginning his adult life as a nomad without a country, Steinberg never ceased to be an avid traveler who enjoyed exploring remote destinations as much as seeing America from the Greyhound. Both of them had a common fascination with Italian architecture, culture, and lifestyle. During their youth, they spent a significant amount of time in Italy at a formative age that left an indelible impact on their later work. Venturi was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, Steinberg studied architecture at the Regio Politecnico in Milan and lived in the same city one year after having earned his degree.

Trained at the height of modernism, Venturi and Steinberg turned into critics of its normative outcomes, using the tedium and fatigue of the modernist language as its own critical tools. Employed differently by each of them, boredom presented a never-before-used conceptual frame to re-imagine what architecture could become. Venturi proposed overstimulation as a way to overcome the tedium and alienation of modern architecture and public spaces. Looking at the

xxvi

world with skepticism and serious humor, Steinberg’s drawings suggested irony as a mode to accept and, through acceptance, prevail over the boredom spawned from generic and impersonal architectures.

While Venturi uses boredom as a point of entry into the criticism of modern architecture, Steinberg employs it as a generative tool and, as we will see later, understands it as a state-of- mind that offers a gateway to imagination. Venturi recognizes boredom as the alienating mood of midcentury and proposes formal techniques to escape the tedium of modernism. Steinberg, on the other hand, plunges deep into boredom, inverting it into meditation and introspection, the creative moods of vita contemplativa.

I look at Venturi and Steinberg’s work through the lens of microhistory. Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg has put forward a research methodology that examines how small events contain and reveal larger truths.2 Employing the concept of microhistory (that he re-appropriated from other scholars, re-defining its relevance), Ginzburg has scrutinized the overlooked, the disregarded, and the ephemeral as a way to gain access to history at small scale. Individual stories give insight into wider collective histories. Within this framework, the relevance of a secondary character or that of a minor incident have the power to expose a broader network of significance. Not unlike the procedures routinely performed by doctors or detectives, this method requires a close reading of clues whose piecing together constructs speculative, yet rigorous, scenarios.3 Similarly, the dissertation unpacks the overlooked notions of boredom, boring, and interesting as a mode to construct a “thick description” of midcentury architecture.4 Simultaneously, it makes an argument for a positive valorization of boredom as a slow-paced mood of contemplation and introspection.

Attempting to be true to the bodies of work examined, the dissertation follows two intertwined, yet distinct threads. The first and most extensive one, studies Venturi’s early work (with an emphasis on his first treatise Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture from 1966) and unpacks his well-known motto Less is a bore in three chapters. Each of the chapters

2 Carlo Ginzburg, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know About It,” Critical Inquiry 20, No.1 (Autumn 1993): 10-35. 3 Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and scientific Method,” History Workshop, No. 9 (Spring 1980): 5- 36. 4 The concept of “thick description” was introduced by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle and developed further by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his 1973 book The Interpretation of Cultures.

xxvii

comprises, in turn, three sections: the first one provides the theoretical background and critical apparatus of the investigation; the middle one situates Venturi’s work within the midcentury background; the last one focuses specifically on Venturi’s work.

The other thread, organized in two interludes interwoven between the main chapters and written in a different voice, looks at Steinberg’s work and its intersections with boredom through a series of speculative readings of his drawings.

The first chapter charts Venturi’s understanding of boredom in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture through Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field. It is when habitus loses its bodily dimension and turns into mere habit, that it becomes boring. A different understanding of habitus as disembodied practice informs Venturi’s discourse in his first treatise. Influenced by cognitive psychology, behaviorism, New Criticism, and complexity theories from early twentieth century, Venturi has a positivist outlook on architecture and design. Born with modernity, boredom also indicates the beginning of its slow demise. A product of the habitus of the time, Less is a bore also becomes the organizing principle of the visual discourse in Complexity and Contradiction. Conceived as pedagogical props, the illustrations in the book operate as didactic, disembodied, and discursive images. Venturi identifies (and addresses) the issue of boredom as public concern, lack of complexity, and a relational condition between the viewing subject and the architectural object. I suggest that in this early stage of his work, Venturi acknowledges the deeper dimension of boredom to become a contemplative state, an opportunity missed once he focuses on the polemics between the boring and the interesting.

The first interlude introduces Steinberg’s own understanding of boredom through Bourdieu’s habitus as a mode of regenerating the creative impetus of the artist. This section looks at three drawings that evoke Steinberg’s childhood home and street. The embodied practices of his childhood, brought back by nostalgic recollections and longings, create a world that is both real and imagined, historically accurate and fictional. Key to this mode of operating is the folding of boredom into a concept specific to Romanian metaphysics: dor.

The second chapter traces Venturi’s understanding of boredom in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture through the lens of his upbringing as a Quaker. Two of Venturi’s most significant contributions to architectural theory are Less is a bore and the concept of

xxviii

architecture as decorated shed (the latter co-authored with Denise Scott Brown). The two stand in a seemingly polemical position: while the former proposes excess as a design strategy, the latter invokes the flatness of commercial billboards as the most meaningful approach to architecture. I propose that Venturi’s Quaker background accounts for this apparent paradox, where both positions are simultaneously contradictory and legitimate. For Venturi, ideas about flatness are inspired by the overwhelming presence of billboards in midcentury America, but also by the lessons learned in his Quaker milieu. Boredom lies at the core of this conversation, as billboards ultimately propose to solve the problem of modern tedium through distraction and visual stimulations. The flatness of the surface cannot be dissociated from the flatness of meaning.

The second interlude attempts to decipher visual riddles in two drawings by Steinberg. His critique of modernism operates at the level of architectural representation, which in modernity assumes the space of clarity and precision. Instead, Steinberg claims the imprecise territory of visual riddles through even more imprecise tools, such as moods and atmospheres. Operating through inversions, Steinberg shows that boredom is never flat and opens up a thick space of interpretations. Key to his technique is the folding of boredom into daydreaming.

The third chapter maps Venturi’s position on the boring and the interesting as two ostensibly opposite attributes of architecture. The inquiry begins with the question that Venturi and Scott Brown ask in Learning from Las Vegas: “Is boring architecture interesting?” The dichotomy boring – interesting translates into the dichotomy duck – decorated shed situated at the core of their architectural theory. Tracing the intellectual history of the interesting as an aesthetic category emerging in the eighteenth century, the chapter proposes that the boring and the interesting are not dialectically opposed. Rather, they both illustrate a disenchantment and disengagement with the world, along with a lack of commitment to a particular worldview. Looking at Venturi’s early work from Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and at his collaboration with Scott Brown in Learning from Las Vegas, I advance the idea that he builds upon nineteenth century aesthetic theories on form and vitality. Furthermore, I identify specific features of the category of the interesting in architecture. Different from a parallel discourse in visual arts, the interesting in architecture comprises a focus on appearance and formal

xxix

compositions, the use of self-referential and normative practices, and an understanding of complexity as excess and overload.

The consequences of the discourse on the boring and the interesting in architecture go beyond the loose, rhetorical meanings generally associated with them. What is at stake is how we construct our criteria for a meaningful worldview, both as designers and inhabitants of architecture. In an environment oversaturated with visual stimuli and information, exercising our ability to assume boredom as a form of contemplation and introspection might offer unexpected avenues to engage with the infra-ordinary of our world.

The concluding chapter discusses a few “uses of boredom” in contemporary design practices and presents two distinct directions. On the one hand, the work of Bjarke Ingels Group and their emphasis on seeking the interesting; on the other hand, the work of architects such as Alberto Campo Baeza and John Pawson who, without specifically addressing the issue of boredom, engage the most banal and ordinary features of the world as a way to construct and reveal wonder.

xxx

Chapter 1: Between Boredom and Habitus

Introduction

In the preface to Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Robert Venturi states: “As an architect I try to be guided not by habit but by a conscious sense of the past – by precedent, thoughtfully considered.”1 What does the opposition between “habit,” on the one hand, and “a conscious sense of the past,” on the other, indicate? Is it, perhaps, the difference between habit and habitus, the concept coined by French and anthropologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu? What is the role of history and historical precedents? How does Venturi’s statement from the book preface relate to the quip Less is a bore from the subsequent chapters?

The concept of habitus as elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu, although never referenced directly, is a looming presence in the work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Bourdieu generally defined habitus as a physical embodiment of practices, skills, and dispositions constructed upon and derived from our life experiences. This accumulation and growth will determine our choices and preferences. While habitus does imply repetition, it is when it loses its bodily dimension that it becomes tedious and turns into boredom. Venturi (and Scott Brown) approach habitus as a disembodied practice and it is precisely because of this disembodiment that boredom is never really overcome. While Venturi opposes “habit” to a “conscious sense of the past,” another distinction is coming into presence, that between past as finished, gone by time and history as living, active time.

Habit, Venturi suggests, implies a sort of inertia, a conformity to rules lacking critical questioning, a phenomenon he sees happening in the architectural practice of his time devoted to faithfully applying the normative rules of modernism. In this context, habit also implies the loss of an architectural past, which he proposes to revitalize by a careful and critical examination of historical precedents, brought as evidence toward a re-evaluation not only of the past, but mostly of the present and future of architecture. Comparing Venturi’s habit to Bourdieu’s habitus, I propose that Venturi seems to overlook the nature of habit as living practice, accumulated in

1 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition (New York: Museum on Modern Art, 1977), 13. 1

time, in which history is present, if disguised. He reduces it, instead, to the repetition, routine, conformity, and norm associated with the stale iteration of forms that he identifies with modernist architecture. It is from this numbing repetition that boredom is born and with it Venturi’s reaction: Less is a bore. Less and more define a quantitative approach, which in the book translates into an excess of images that son become boring.

The understanding of boredom and the boring has changed throughout Venturi’s work, moving from what I propose was the broad assertion of Less is a bore in his first book, to the instrumentalization of the boring and the interesting as aesthetic tools in the later works of Venturi and Scott Brown. Less is a bore is not simply a pun on the much celebrated modernist adage nor only reflective of a particular state of architecture, although it is also both of them at the same time. Less is a bore is a product of habitus in the terms defined by Bourdieu, thus summarizing the ethos and the mood of the age. Less is a bore, although applied to architecture, addresses issues larger than architecture itself and situates it in the broader field of “cultural production.” Venturi’s quip acknowledges the generalized presence of a mood that, it has been suggested, was intensifying in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Sociologist Orrin Klapp has proposed that the increased use of the word boredom between 1931 and 1961 indicates the very expansion of this mood in modern society.2 Moreover, I suggest, while boredom was born with modernity, it also indicates the advent of discontent with modernity itself.

1.1. Learning from habitus and behaviorism

Less is a bore first appeared in Venturi’s 1965 article published in the Yale University architecture journal, Perspecta. The article offered a preview to the subsequent book that Venturi published the following year.3 Richly illustrated, both the article and the book include a multitude of images (three hundred and fifty in the book) whose role as a body of knowledge has not been carefully examined. I will look at how ideas about boredom and habitus have informed

2 Orrin Klapp, Overload and Boredom: Essays in the Quality of Life in the Information Society (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986); Peter Conrad, “It’s Boring: Notes on the Meanings of Boredom in Everyday Life,” Qualitative Sociology 20, No.4 (1997): 466. 3 Robert Venturi, “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: Selections from a Forthcoming Book,” Perspecta 9/10 (1965): 17-56. 2

the visual discourse in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Proposing that the images in the book operate at various levels, I will unpack them from three different perspectives:

Didactic images. Firstly, and most clearly, as a series of representations of buildings, they perform the didactic function of providing architectural principles, giving us an insight into strategies of teaching and learning.

Disembodied images. Secondly, as a display of (mostly) historical precedents, taking out of their context, they act as signs and symbols that validate Venturi’s undertaking, also showing how relying on a “disembodied mind” eventually results in disembodied signs and symbols.

Discursive images. Lastly, as a lavish collection of items exhibited on almost every page of the book, through quantitative overload they illustrate the idea that Less is a bore in the most obvious way.

Habitus. Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, practice, and field provide a useful framework for situating Venturi’s motto Less is a bore for understanding it both as an architectural position and a larger cultural stance. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (referred to both as a plural and a singular noun) revolves around oppositions that often appear difficult to grasp. Habitus designates sets of dispositions (in other words, subjective qualities) and structures (or objective arrangements) with particular characteristics: while ordered, they don’t obey to rules; while adjusted to objectives, they don’t deliberately envision them; while systematized, they don’t result from the action of a conductor;4 while organized as strategies, they are not the product of a premeditated intention.5 Habitus produces practices manifested in everyday life from small, individual actions to larger, collective acts at the level of culture, economy, politics, etc. Bourdieu rejects both the deterministic notion of practice as a mechanical reaction directly

4 “(s)ystems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to functioning as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated” and “regular” without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being, all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.” (Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, U.K; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 72). 5 “The habitus is the source of these series of moves which are objectively organized as strategies without being the product of a genuine strategic intention – which would presuppose at least that they are the perceived as one strategy among other possible strategies.” (Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 73). 3

derived from preceding actions, and practice as the result of free will.6 Through habitus, Bourdieu inhabits the gap between the objectivity of institutionalized structures and the subjectivity of the agent, between the structuralist exclusion of the individual and the Romantic vision of the artist, between determinism and autonomy, the group and the individual. He moves beyond positivist explanations and proposes to find meaning in the interactions between the practices of the individual (understood as part of the group) and those of the group (constituted from individuals).

It is because subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what they do has more meaning than they know. The habitus is the universalizing mediation which causes an individual agent’s practices, without either explicit reason or signifying intent, to be none the less “sensible” and “reasonable.”7

The homogeneity of habitus within a group causes practices to be intelligible, foreseeable, harmonized without a “conscious reference to a norm,” and “mutually adjusted” without explicit co-ordination.8 Habitus as “immanent law” has been acquired by each individual from their earliest upbringing, “which is the precondition not only for the co-ordination of practices but also for practices of co-ordination … .”9 Habitus is the product of objective structures “which are active only when embodied in a competence acquired in the course of a particular history.”10 Two key aspects in Bourdieu’s habitus are the notion of embodiment and the role of history. The former, focusing on the individual, was exemplified through various instances from the early acquisition of language by a child to the more complex acquisition of a craft by an apprentice. The former (history), referred to structures of groups, communities, and

66 “It is necessary to abandon all theories which explicitly or implicitly treat practice as a mechanical reaction, directly determined by the antecedent conditions and entirely reducible to the mechanical functioning of pre- established assemblies, “models” or “roles” … . But rejection of mechanistic theories in no way implies that, in accordance with another obligatory opinion, we should bestow on some creative free will the free and willful power to constitute, on the instant, the meaning of the situation by projecting the ends aiming at its transformation, and that we should reduce the objective intentions and constituted significations of actions and works to the conscious and deliberate intentions of their authors.” (Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 73). 7 Ibid., 79. 8 Ibid., 80. 9 Ibid., 81. 10 Ibid., 81. 4

societies: “In short, the habitus, the product of history, produces individual and collective practices, and hence history, in accordance with the schemes engendered by history.”11

Bourdieu points to the essential role of the body and embodiment in various processes of learning. He imagines these processes as concentric circles starting from the family and moving toward the world.12 The child learns by imitating not abstract models, but the concrete actions and bodily postures of adults;13 in a non-institutionalized education system, the transmission of learning occurs through practice;14 learning is assimilated through concrete “numerical series” (defined by structured relationships between elements) such as verbal products, objects, or practices.15 Learning itself is an embodiment of the structures of the world, or in other words, “the appropriating by the world of a body thus enabled to appropriate the world.”16 Consequently, the mind formed in a world of physical objects inherently overcomes the conflict between subjectivity and objectivity because world, metaphors, and objects work together through the practices spawned by habitus.17

Two significant sources of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus as a “generative structure of practical action” are relevant to our discussion:18 on the one hand, psychologist Jean Piaget’s

11 Ibid., 82. 12 … the habitus acquired in the family underlies the structuring of school experiences … and the habitus transformed by schooling, itself diversified, in turn underlies the structuring of all subsequent experiences … and so on, from restructuring to restructuring. (Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 87). 13 “The child imitates not “models,” but other people’s actions. … in all societies, children are particularly attentive to the gestures and postures which, in their eyes, express everything that goes to make an accomplished adult – a way of walking, a tilt of the head, facial expressions, ways of sitting and of using implements, always associated with a tone of voice, a style of speech, and … a certain subjective experience.” (Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 87). 14 … the essential part of the modus operandi which defines practical mastery is transmitted in practice, in its practical state, without attaining the level of discourse. (Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 87). 15 Unlike an incoherent series of figures, which can be learnt only gradually, through repeated attempts and with continuous predictable progress, a numerical series is mastered more easily because it contains a structure which makes it unnecessary to memorize all the numbers one by one: in verbal products such as proverbs, sayings, maxims, songs, riddles, or games; in objects, such as tools, the house, or the village; or again, in practices such as contest of honor, gift exchanges, rites, etc. … [the child] has no difficulty in grasping the rationale of what are clearly series and in making its own in the form of a principle generating conduct organized in accordance with the same rationale. (Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 88). 16 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 89. 17 The mind born of the world of objects does not rise as a subjectivity confronting an objectivity: the objective universe is made up of objects which are the product of objectifying operations structured according to the very structures which the mind applies to it. The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects which is itself but an endless circle of mutually reflecting metaphors. (Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 91). 18 Omar Lizardo identifies Bourdieu’s two major uses of habitus as (1) perceptual and classifying structure and (2) a generative structure of practical action. [Omar Lizardo, “The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34, No. 4 (Dec. 2004): 375-401]. 5

conception of knowledge as practical action and, on the other hand, Erwin Panofsky’s theory on Gothic architecture as a result of the practices and world-view specific to medieval Scholasticism. Piaget wrote:

To know is to transform reality [through action] in order to understand how a certain state is brought about. By virtue of this point of view, I find myself opposed to the view of knowledge as a copy, a passive copy of reality. … To my way of thinking, knowing an object does not mean copying it – it means acting upon it.19

Bourdieu proposed an early definition of habitus in the postface to his 1967 translation of Erwin Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism where he described it as

a system of schemas [that] constantly orients choices which, though not deliberate, are nonetheless systematic, without being arranged and organized expressly according to an ultimate end, are nonetheless imbued with a sort of finality … .20

Both sources ground conceptions about learning, knowledge, and the creative process (and by extension, architectural learning and making) in concrete actions and embodied practices. While “the system of schemas” builds the world and is built by it, the world is known and made intelligible through its continuous making and remaking.

With the concept of field, Bourdieu roots the actions of the agent (specifically those of the artist or the writer) in a network of social and historical relations. He defines the main task of any historical study as “constructing the space of positions and the space of position-takings [prises de positions] in which they are expressed.”21 The former comprises the practices and production of the agents involved in the field (e.g. artists, writers), whereas the latter constitutes the totality of institutions (private or public) that legitimate the recognition and authority in a particular field.22 Specific to the notion of field is the internal struggle between the heteronomy

19 Jean Piaget quoted in Lizardo, “The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus, 384. 20 Pierre Bourdieu, postface to Erwin Panofsky, Architecture Gothique et pensée scholastique (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1967), 147. 21 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 29-30. 22 The space of literary or artistic position-takings, i.e. the structured set of the manifestations of the social agents involved in the field … is inseparable from the space of literary or artistic positions defined by possession of a 6

of position-takings (e.g. the dominant economic and political forces that legitimate the ‘bourgeois art’) and the autonomy of positions (e.g. artists and writers producers of ‘art for art sake’).23 A consequence of this inherent tension is that “The meaning of a work … changes automatically with each change in the field within which it is situated for the spectator or reader.”24 One of the main challenges in the historical study of any field is to reconstruct the original network of people, relationships, facts or events that constitute the underlying fabric of a work and which most of the time remained unaccounted for in testimonies of the time precisely because “they were part of the self-evident givens of the situation.”25 In other words, without an understanding of the habitus of the time, a work lacks depth and becomes, instead, a thin surface.

Ignorance of everything which goes to make up ‘the mood of the age’ produces a derealization of works: stripped of everything which attached them to the most concrete debates of their time … , they are impoverished and transformed in the direction of intellectualism or an empty humanism.26

It is important to note that Venturi does recognize, and in fact capitalizes on, the notion that the meaning of the work changes with each change in the field. This idea is central to his combinatory techniques of isolating architectural elements and re-organizing them according to new sets of rules. His take, however, is different from Bourdieu’s. The concept of field as the intersection of agents, groups and practices is reduced to a narrow concept of background derived from the perceptual theories of Gestalt psychology. As we will see later in the discussion of the images in Complexity and Contradiction, Venturi uses a model of communication defined as the relationship between sender – medium – channel – receiver – feedback – context – noise. Buildings become facades without environment and signs are floating signifiers. As Deborah

determinate quantity of specific capital (recognition) and, at the same time, by occupation of a determinate position in the structure of the distribution of this specific capital. (Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 30). 23 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 40. 24 Ibid., 30-31. 25 “One of the major difficulties of the social history of philosophy, art or literature is that it has to reconstruct these spaces of original possibles which, because they were part of the self-evident givens of the situation, remained unremarked and are therefore unlikely to be mentioned in contemporary accounts, chronicles or memoirs. It is difficult to conceive of the vast amount of information which is linked to membership of a field and which all contemporaries immediately invest in their reading of works: information about institutions – e.g. academies, journals, magazines, galleries, publishers, etc. – and about persons, their relationships, liaisons and quarrels, information about the ideas and problems which are ‘in the air’ and circulate orally in gossip and rumour.” (Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 31-32). 26 Ibid., 32. 7

Fausch has noted, “one of the key contentions of Complexity and Contradiction was that the perception and the meaning of form occurred within, and was dependent upon, its context,” where the definition of context shifted from historical to perceptual, to urban.27

Venturi writes:

Gestalt psychology maintains that context contributes meaning to a part and change in context causes change in meaning. The architect thereby, through the organization of parts, creates meaningful context for them within the whole. … Familiar things seen in an unfamiliar context become perceptually new as well as old.28

Bourdieu’s habitus mediates between the scale of the individual and that of history through the active presence of the body and its embodiment in various practices. The nature of habitus also allows us to understand “the structural lag between opportunities and the dispositions to grasp them” that accounts for our inability to see the role of the body in our thinking of larger historical crises.29 Underlying Bourdieu’s theories is the notion of relationship constantly present in the interaction between the body of the individual and the collective body of the group, between individual and history, between the space of positions and that of position- takings, between different forces within a field, between the agent and the world. In this world of relations, the form of education described through habitus is itself a relational process, based not on mechanical learning, but on knowledge acquired through practice. “Relational learning” does not exclude models or role-models, but integrates them into habitus. Through habitus, the apprentice exercises learning through discovery, which differentiates true creativity from pastiche.

An artist searches for true vision, but having found it, leaves in his successors’ hands the blueprint of a new academy. Almost anyone with a modicum of talent and sufficient

27 Deborah Fausch, The Context of Meaning is Everyday Life: Venturi and Scott Brown’s Theories of Architecture and Urbanism, Ph.D. Dissertation (Princeton University, 1999), 26-27. 28 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 43. 29 “The hysteresis of habitus … is doubtless one of the foundations of the structural lag between opportunities and the dispositions to grasp them which is the cause of missed opportunities and, in particular, of the frequently observed incapacity to think historical crises in categories of perception and thought other than those of the past, albeit a revolutionary past.” (Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 83). 8

application can appropriate another man’s mode of representation. … But he cannot discover it.30

In Complexity and Contradiction Venturi recognizes a moment of crisis in architecture. Situated at this moment, his work constitutes a hinge between, in Bourdieu’s terms, “opportunities,” on the one hand, and the “dispositions to grasp them,” on the other. The path he chooses proposes an approach to the past that favors a more formal reading of history.

New Criticism and Gestalt psychology have shaped Venturi’s approach to tradition and history, on the one hand, and habit, on the other, two influences that he openly acknowledged throughout his first book, as well as in subsequent writings. Venturi was building upon the definition of tradition articulated by the New Critics through T.S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and Individual Talent.” According to Eliot, the creative artist should be aware of the presence of the past and have a sense of the larger genealogy to which he or she belongs.31

The second part of Eliot’s essay, which Venturi does not acknowledge explicitly but which, I believe, plays an equally significant part in his theory, defines the role of the mature poet and, by extension, of the creative artist in general, as being analogous to the catalyst in a chemical reaction. Unaffected by the processes taking place, but key in shaping the resulting elements, the catalyst remains “inert, neutral, and unchanged.”32 Likewise, the mind of the mature poet within which “feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations,” needs to remain unchanged by those feelings that enter into the process.33 Eliot writes:

[t]he more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates. … The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.”34

30 Leo Steinberg, “The Eye is a Part of the Mind,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 294. 31 T.S.Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 3-4, quoted in Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 13. 32 Ibid., 7. 33 Ibid., 7. 34 Ibid., 7-8. 9

Speaking against what he calls a “metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul,” Eliot sees the task of the poet not in seeking “new human emotions to express,” but in using the ordinary ones and “working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.”35 For Venturi, the dissociation of the artistic mind from emotions translates into the search for an “objective” architectural form legitimized though historical precedents and a “conscious sense of the past.”36

A less explicit reference supports the idea that Venturi understood habit as a disembodied convention, norm or routine. Describing his firm’s entry for the 1966 Copley Square competition in the last chapter of Complexity and Contradiction, Venturi mentioned Philip Johnson’s essay “The Seven Crutches of Modern Architecture,” first delivered as an informal address to the architecture students at Harvard in December 1954 and later published in Perspecta.37 Describing what he called “the Crutch of Utility or Usefulness,” Johnson dismissed it as an “old Harvard habit,”38 later defining “the Crutch of Comfort” also as a “habit that we come by, the same as utility.”39 Overcoming habit as a bad custom seemed to be an attitude recommended to architects as a way to enhance their creativity and critical thinking.

Venturi’s understanding of habit has negative connotations and resides at the intersection of his reading of New Criticism, his interest in Gestalt, and a certain approach to design as problem-solving, an attitude informed, I suggest, by behaviorism, the other strong direction in American psychology in the early twentieth century. (Behaviorism will latter become central to the development of environmental design.) Although never addressed directly, behaviorism and notions about behavior underlie Venturi’s writings and he was most likely familiar with them. Venturi was reading Herman A. Simon, a scientist whose research ranged across a multitude of fields from computer science, artificial intelligence, and complex systems, to cognitive psychology and administrative behavior. In the chapter “The Obligation Toward a Difficult Whole” of Complexity and Contradiction, Venturi quotes Simon’s definition of a complex

35 Ibid., 9-10. 36 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 13. 37 “I think ‘relating’ buildings is the eighth crutch of Modern architecture which Philip Johnson might have included.” (Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 130). Philip Johnson, “The Seven Crutches of Modern Architecture,” Perspecta 3 (1955): 40-45. 38 Johnson, “The Seven Crutches of Modern Architecture,” 41. 39 Ibid., 42. 10

system from the article “The Architecture of Complexity” published in 1962.40 The goal of the article is to report “on some things we have been learning about particular kinds of complex systems encountered in the behavioral sciences.”41 Simon will address not only issues related to complexity and behavior, but also symbolic systems – all of these ideas will be present in various forms in Venturi’s book.42

Gestalt and behaviorism. Emerging roughly at the same time, around 1912-1913, in Germany and, respectively, the United States, Gestalt43 and behaviorism shared a common criticism of and discontent with late nineteenth century psychology. However, their positions were different:44

Gestalt psychology primarily protested against the analysis of consciousness into elements and the exclusion of values from the data of consciousness, whereas behaviorism mostly protested against the inclusion of the data of consciousness in psychology.45

Psychologist Edward G. Boring proposed a concise definition of Gestalt as a form of psychology dealing with wholes (as given in experience) and whose data are phenomena – a position derived from the conviction that a conscious person always experiences wholes.46 Borrowed from phenomenology, the words phenomena and phenomenal experience, however, had a different meaning for Gestalt psychologists who shelved notions such as “sensations, images, and feelings” along with their attributes (such as “quality, intensity, extensity, and

40 “A complex system in Herbert A. Simon’s definition includes ‘a large number of parts that interact in a non- simple way.’” (Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 88.) 41 Herbert A. Simon, “The Architecture of Complexity,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106, No. 6 (December 1962): 467. 42 For a detailed discussion of the origin of Venturi’s complexity theories see Peter L. Laurence, “Contradictions and Complexities: Jane Jacobs’s and Robert Venturi’s Complexity Theories,” Journal of Architectural Education 59, No. 3 (February 2006): 49-60. 43 The German word Gestalt means both form or shape, and essence. 44 “Each [Gestalt and behaviorism] is a protest against the ‘new’ German psychology of the late nineteenth century, the psychology of Wundt, G.E. Müller and Titchener, but the two are different protests.” (Edward G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology 2nd edition (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957), 587). Regarded as one of the founding figures of modern psychology, Wilhelm Wundt studied primarily thoughts, perception, and feelings, areas associated today with cognitive psychology. 45 Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, 587. 46 Ibid, 588. 11

duration”) arguing that one can perceive whole objects without consciously knowing its constitutive elements.47 Gestalt took a stance against previous approaches in psychology, such as analysis into elements, associative congeries, and sensory content, proposing, respectively: a phenomenological description, the emergence of forms in wholes, and the relevance of meanings and objects.48

The basic principles of Gestalt psychology revolve around laws of form (applied especially to visual form), relativity, and transposition (objects remain the same when the parts change but the relations between them remain the same), object constancy, field dynamics, and isomorphism (correspondence between the perceptual field and the underlying excitatory brain field).49

The laws of form have influenced theories of perception in both art and architecture.50 One of the central ideas is that “a perceptual field tends to become organized,” where parts form connections further grouped in structures.51 Visual perception is divided into two parts: figure (situated in the center of attention, defined by a contour, and having an object character) and ground (located in the margin of attention, lacking definition, and seen further away than the figure).52 This principle had a significant impact on architectural representation and Venturi and Scott Brown’s work in particular.

Structures may be simple or complex and the degree of complexity corresponds to the degree of articulation. A good form is well articulated. A strong form resists disintegration. A closed form is both good and strong and “an open form tends to achieve closure by completing itself.” In the process of completing themselves, forms tend toward symmetry, balance, and proportion. “Organization tends to form structured wholes that are objects.”53 An object has object consistency, i.e. the property of preserving its “proper shape, size, and color in spite of change in the stimulus-situation.” Organization and object character “depend on the relations

47 Ibid., 592. For instance: “A square is more than four lines, but four lines, successively coterminous, at right angles, and forming a closed figure are a square.” (Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, 589) 48 Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, 589. 49 Ibid., 611-615. 50 See Arnheim, Gombrich. 51 Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, 611. 52 Ibid., 606, 611. 53 Ibid., 611-612. 12

between parts and not on the particular characteristics of the parts.”54 “Figure-ground,” “complexity,” “articulation,” “whole,” “context” – in Complexity and Contradiction Venturi borrows concepts and terminology from Gestalt psychology and applies them to the architectural language. A 1951 collection of essays on the relationship of nature, form, and aesthetics included chapters on Gestalt and form and was part of the library of Venturi and Scott Brown.55

In 1913, American psychologist John B. Watson published “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” an article later known as the “behaviorist manifesto,”56 the founding document of the other major direction in American psychology: behaviorism. Watson’s main argument was that behaviorism, a term that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, he coins through this article, approaches psychology as a “purely objective experimental branch of natural science” whose theoretical goal is to predict and control behavior.57 In his book Behaviorism, first published in 1924, Watson expanded the nature, objectives, and methodology of this branch of psychology, which he defined as objective, in opposition with the introspective or subjective approach, prevalent until 1912.58 He reinforced behaviorism’s affiliation with natural sciences and more specifically with physiology.59 He determined its goal “to be able, given the stimulus, to predict the response – or, seeing the reaction take place to state what the stimulus is that has called out the reaction.”60 In terms of subject matter, while subjective psychology claims consciousness as its topic, behaviorism:

…holds that the subject matter of psychology is the behavior of the human being. Behaviorism claims that consciousness is neither a definite nor a usable concept. The behaviorist, who has been trained always as an experimentalist, holds, further, that belief

54 Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, 611-612. 55 Aspects of Form: A Symposium on Form in Nature and Art, ed. Lancelot Law Whyte (New York: American Elsevier Pub. Co, 1968); Deborah Fausch discusses the presence of the book in Venturi and Scott Brown’s library in her dissertation The Context of Meaning is Everyday Life (Princeton University, 1999): 84, note 71. 56 Gregory J. Madden, “Editorial: An Anniversary and an Inaugural Issue,” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 99, No. 1 (January 2013): 125. 57 John B. Watson, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” Psychological Review, No. 20 (1913): 158. 58 John B. Watson, Behaviorism (New York: W.W Norton, 1925), 1. 59 Ibid., 11. 60 Ibid., 18. 13

in the existence of consciousness goes back to the ancient days of superstition and magic.61

Shifting the focus from subjectively defined terms (such as sensation, perception, image, desire, purpose, thinking or emotion) to “things that can be observed” (such as behavior, or “what the organism does or says”), this form of objective psychology describes behavior in terms of stimulus and response.62 Watson defines the stimulus as “any object in the general environment or any change in the tissues themselves due to the physiological condition of the animal” and the response as “anything the animal does.”63 Among more sophisticated and elaborate forms of response, Watson lists “building a skyscraper, drawing plans.”64 Later in the text, expanding upon the notion of response, Watson brings up another architectural example:

Let me emphasize again that the behaviorist is primarily interested in the behavior of the whole man. From morning to night he watches him perform his daily round of duties. If it is brick-laying, he would like to measure the number of bricks he can lay under different conditions, how long he can go without dropping from fatigue, how long it takes him to learn his trade, whether we can improve his efficiency or get him to do the same amount of work in a less period of time.65

It is not without significance that from the early stages of its development, behaviorism relied on architecture to demonstrate its arguments. Stripped of any subjective (also described by Watson as “medieval,” “savage”66 and, implicitly, irrational) content, behaviorism looks for objective, positivist manifestations of human behavior and turns to architecture as an appropriate terrain to edify its ideas. An intersection between architecture and behaviorism, at least in terms of language, is the concept of functionalism.

Discussing the recently emerged typology of the tall office building, in 1896 Louis Sullivan proposed that “form ever follows function,” an idea that he will develop in two more essays on “Function and Form” published in 1901-1902 and later collected in the volume

61 Watson, Behaviorism, 2. 62 Watson, Behaviorism, 6. 63 Watson, Behaviorism, 6. 64 Ibid., 6. 65 Ibid., 15. 66 Ibid., 2, 5. 14

Kindergarten Chats.67 Usually misinterpreted, Sullivan’s dictum will be appropriated in the discourse of modern architecture that makes functionalism – reduced to deriving architectural form strictly from the function, program or use of the building – one of its main objectives. Outlining the intentions and methodology of behaviorism, in 1913 Watson wrote: “I feel that behaviorism is the only consistent and logical functionalism,”68 an instance credited by the Oxford English Dictionary as the first use of the term behaviorism.69

Behaviorism relies on observation as its main methodological technique, limiting its investigation to “things that can be observed” in order to “formulate laws concerning only those things.”70 The data resulted from the process of observation is subjected to scientific analysis using the tools of scientists: logic and mathematics.71 Taking the use of the latter to an extreme, early mid-century Yale Unievrsity psychologist Clark L. Hull developed a mathematical model of understanding behavior based on mathematical formulas and equations that consider the “quantitative law of habit formation.”72

After permeating American culture, by 1965, the objectives and methodology of behaviorism were already called into question. Sigmund Koch structured the evolution of behaviorism in classical behaviorism (as shaped by Watson), neobehaviorism (which attempts to realize and implement objectivism at the level of theory), and neo-neobehaviorism (which abandons the idea that stimuli may be reduced to physical description and responses to movements in space and introduces perception and meaning in the definition of stimuli and, respectively, responses).73 Koch acknowledges the failures of modern psychology that “has projected an image of man which is as demeaning as it is simplistic” and recognizes the potential of phenomenology to provide a cure to “the simplification of sensibility, homogenization of taste, attenuation of capacity for experience” that “characterizes our time.”74

67 Louis Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947): “The Tall Office Artistically Considered” (first published in 1896); “Function and Form,” 42-48. 68 Watson, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.” 69 OED, online edition, entry: behaviorism: “1913 J. B. WATSON in Psychol. Rev. XX. 166 I feel that behaviorism is the only consistent and logical functionalism.” 70 Watson, Behaviorism, 6. 71 Watson, Behaviorism, 6. 72 Clark L. Hull, Essentials of Behavior (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1951). 73 Sigmund Koch, “Psychology and Conceptions of Knowledge,” Behaviorism and Phenomenology, 7-20. 74 Ibid., 37-38. 15

In an effort to redeem behaviorism, psychologist B.F. Skinner published in 1974 About Behaviorism, a book that begins by shifting the definition of behaviorism from the science of human behavior to the philosophy of that science.75 The introduction listed what Skinner identified as the misunderstandings related to behaviorism (among others, that it ignores consciousness, feelings, and states of mind, that cannot explain creative achievements, that misses the essential nature of a human being, that it dehumanizes man and it is oversimplified, naïve, reductionistic, and scientistic rather than scientific.)76 He claimed that behaviorism should not be understood based on Watson’s “behaviorist manifesto” from 1913, which was flawed mainly because at the time “very few scientific facts about behavior – particularly human behavior – were available.”77 Skinner argued that a more nuanced perspective is needed because “there are many different kinds of behavioral science” and the one he presented in his book was “the philosophy of this special version of a science of behavior.”78

Gestalt and behaviorist ideas were appropriated in art and architecture in various ways. Having studied Gestalt psychology in Berlin, Rudolf Arnheim applied its principles to the visual arts.79 His essay “Gestalt Psychology and Artistic Form” was included in the anthology Aspects of Form that Venturi and Scott Brown were familiar with.80 In an article urging architects to “act” rather than “behave,” John M. Johansen – a member of the “Harvard Five,” along with Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores, Philip Johnson, and Eliot Noyes – defined behavior as a “mode of conducting oneself; deportment, the way in which an organism or person responds to stimuli, or conformance to environment.”81 Criticizing behaviorism in architecture for being “governed by the same attitude of mind”82 and for encouraging collaboration in design as a way to compromise ideas,83 Johansen asked architects to “act,” i.e. to be, among other qualities, free, original,

75 B. F. Skinner, About Behaviorism (New York: Knopf, 1974), 3. 76 Ibid., 4-5. 77 Ibid., 6. 78 Ibid., 7-8. 79 Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954); Rudolf Arnheim, Toward a Psychology of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); 80 Aspects of Form: A Symposium on Form in Nature and Art, ed. Lancelot Law Whyte (New York: American Elsevier Pub. Co, 1968). 81 John Johansen, “Act and Behavior in Architecture,” Perspecta 7 (1961): 43. 82 Ibid., 45. 83 Ibid., 47. 16

courageous, and disruptive.84 In the late 1960s and 1970s, behaviorism will provide the foundation of environmental design. Paraphrasing the title of Venturi’s book, Amos Rapoport and Robert E. Kantor – an architect and a psychologist, respectively – publish in 1967 “Complexity and Ambiguity in Environmental Design.”85 (Referencing Venturi’s treatise, the article indirectly suggests that architecture should be understood as environmental design.) Grounding their argument in cognitive psychology, they aim to demonstrate scientifically that good design should be based on complex systems in which the deliberate introduction of novelty and variety generates the ideal “optimal perceptual rate” between monotony and chaos.86 Writing on architectural meaning, Robert G. Hershberger – another proponent of environmental design – embraces what he calls “mentalistic” and “mediational” theories: the former imply the dissociation of mind and body in the reading of images, signs, and symbols, and the latter, much like behavioral theories, focus on stimulus, response, and the mediation process in between.87

Let us see now how some of the principles found in New Criticism, Gestalt, and behaviorism underlie the visual and theoretical discourse of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.

Didactic images. Thoughts about teaching and learning are central to the work of Venturi and Scott Brown. Defining themselves simultaneously as teachers and students, architects and lay-people, operating from within and without the profession, they have summarized their take on education and design in the approach of “learning from…” employed as a rhetorical strategy of humbleness in front and acceptance of the richness of the environment. “Learning from…” also implied a non-judgmental view and openness toward everything that the surroundings – social, cultural, historical, architectural, etc. – might offer. While Learning from Las Vegas is the most celebrated of the couple’s “learnings,” it was preceded and followed by various other

84 Ibid., 48-50. 85 Amos Rapoport and Robert E. Kantor, “Complexity and Ambiguity in Environmental Design,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 33, No. 4 (1967): 210-221. 86 Ibid., 211. 87 Robert G. Hershberger, “Architecture and Meaning,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 4, No. 4 (October 1970): 39- 42. 17

“learning from’s…:” Lutyens (1969), pop (1971), Levittown (1970), Beaux Arts (1977-1979), Africa (1985), planning (2004).

While architecture history was taught as a succession of styles, in the 1960s architecture schools shared a common concern about how to teach history and theory. In April 1967, the subject of the spring conference of the Society of Architectural Historians held at UCLA was “Teaching Architectural History to Students of Architecture, Urban Design and Urban Development.” At the time a faculty member at UCLA, Denise Scott Brown wrote an article for the journal Arts and Architecture commenting on the different positions scholars were taking at the conference.88 For Peter Collins the goal of an architectural history course was not to add “’cultural frills’ to a technical education,” but to develop students’ critical thinking, a skill that they could apply in their own work.89 (Bringing up the question of choice in the curriculum, Collins suggested that the practitioner-teacher might omit even subject-matters that bore him!90) Taking a different stance, Spiro Kostof did not believe that architectural history could enhance one’s critical thinking, nor would it have a significant influence on one’s work; instead, he saw the role of architectural history as a “broadening personal experience” for the student.91 Scott Brown proposes to bridge the gap between these two positions through an approach to architectural “history” as analysis and comparison of examples that go across time and space, rather than chronologically, while at the same time bring forth topics relevant to studio work. (This comparative methodology was common in the teaching of art and architectural history and was applied in the classroom through parallel slide projections, a practice that survives past the twentieth century. The comparison between boring and interesting architecture from Learning from Las Vegas) Without acknowledging specifically the course on “Theories of Architecture” that she had collaborated on with Venturi, she makes the case for a course in which, she argues, these principles and techniques have been successfully applied.92

Drawing from both architectural precedents and his own interests (New Criticism, Gestalt, and Pop Art), Venturi designed his architectural theory course – taught in the Department of Architecture in the Graduate School of Fine Arts at University of Pennsylvania –

88 Denise Scott Brown, “Teaching Architectural History,” Arts and Architecture 84, No. 5 (May 1967): 30. 89 Ibid., 30. 90 Ibid., 30. 91 Ibid., 30. 92 Ibid., 30. 18

around a variety of topics, usually as pairings.93 The course – developed and taught during the years in which Venturi was preparing his manuscript for Complexity and Contradiction – provides the content for his book and some of the ideas developed later first appear in his lecture notes. For example, early thoughts about boredom are already present in the course outline – the idea of balancing unity with variety within the whole (derived from Gestalt psychology) translates as the opposition between boredom and chaos, which later finds its place in Chapter 7, “Contradiction Adapted” of Complexity and Contradiction.94

It seems our fate now to be faced with either the endless inconsistencies of roadtown, which is chaos, or the infinite consistency of Levittown (or the ubiquitous Levittown-like scene illustrated in figure 89), which is boredom. In roadtown, we have a false complexity; in Levittown a false simplicity. 95

Little attention has been paid, however, to the notion of learning implicit in the selection of images for Complexity and Contradiction, in spite of the book having its origin in a graduate course. Throughout the entire book, the abundance of historical precedents taken out of their original field and stripped of habitus (in Bourdieu’s terms), are used to provide architectural lessons, and gives us an insight into strategies of teaching and learning. The educational display of images constitutes what Bourdieu has defined as a “series of figures, which can be learnt only gradually, through repeated attempts and with continuous predictable progress,” unlike “numerical series” whose internal logic and structure make for an easy appropriation and assimilation.96 Complexity and Contradiction deliberately assumes a didactic role. However, the wealth of images does not translate into a wealth of relationships and, paradoxically, instead of bringing history closer, distances one from a deeper understanding of the past. Images operate not as models, but rather as samples disconnected from each other.

In Complexity and Contradiction, but also later in Learning from Las Vegas, as well as in studio and research projects, Venturi and Scott Brown analyze and observe people’s material

93 They ranged from “Site and Context” (Lecture 2), “Program and Use” (Lecture 3), “Structure and Form” (Lecture 4) to “Materials and Texture” (Lecture 5), “Composition: Proportion, Unity” (Lecture 11), and “Balance and Rhythm” (Lecture 12). Venturi Scott Brown Collection at the Architectural Archives at University of Pennsylvania. 94 Venturi Scott Brown Collection at the Architectural Archives at University of Pennsylvania. 225. RV 187. 95 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 54. 96 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 88. 19

culture or, as they will later summarize in the title of an exhibition, “signs of life.”97 In his first book, Venturi displays photographs of buildings’ exteriors as evidence of formal composition strategies (plans, site plans, and particularly sections are extremely scarce). Showing empirical evidence and gathering measurable facts is a scientific method that builds a body of knowledge based on experimentation and observation. As we have already seen, in American psychology it was behaviorism that applied the scientific methods specific to natural sciences to the study of human behavior. While Venturi explicitly acknowledged the influence of Gestalt psychology on his work, he also employed, perhaps unknowingly, a behavioristic approach to construct his theory.98 This strategy accounts for his reliance on historical precedents as legitimating instances, as facts that can be collected and assembled in order to construct a proof. As images accompany and reference the text, they aim to become explanatory in a scientific, objective manner. The dissociation of mind from emotions (appropriated from New Criticism), along with the emphasis on laws of visual form (derived from Gestalt psychology), result in a sequence of “disembodied” images.

Personal correspondence between Venturi and Scott Brown in 1963 includes Scott Brown’s critique of an early draft of Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction. Responding to what we presume was Venturi’s request for comments on his manuscript, she begins her letter by criticizing the relationship between images and text: “I found it difficult to read in the middle chapters,” she says, because:

Of format – the tennis syndrome between 2 books, not helped by unclear pictures some of which don’t reveal to me what you intended. Can you find ways of relating text +

97 Signs of Life: Symbols in the American City. Bicentennial exhibition for the Smithsonian Institution, installed at the Renwick Gallery, 1976. 98 There are multiple instances in Complexity and Contradiction, as well as in Venturi’s later works, where he reads architecture in a Gestalt key. “Gestalt psychology maintains that context contributes meaning to a part and change in context causes change in meaning. The architect, thereby, through the organization of parts, creates meaningful contexts for them within the whole.” (43) “Gestalt psychology considers a perceptual whole the result, and yet more than, the sum of its parts.” (88) “Gestalt psychology also shows that the nature of the parts, as well as their number and position, influences a perceptual whole and it also has made a further distinction: the degree of wholeness can vary.” (88) In chapter 10, which wraps up the analytical and critical theory before showing examples from his own work, Venturi concludes: “Some of the vivid lessons of the Pop Art, involving contradictions of scale and context, should have awakened architects from prim dreams of pure order, which, unfortunately, are imposed in the easy Gestalt unities of the urban renewal projects of establishment Modern architecture and yet, fortunately, are really impossible to achieve at any great scope.” (104) 20

pictures very closely because when you use so many pictures (& I think you should) + give each so few words, you need all your wits about you to follow, & as it is now, considerable staging power too. An alternative would be to reduce drastically the no of egs & spend more time on each + use really big clear pictures. I don’t think that would be as good.99

She concludes at the end of the letter by criticizing the excess of precedents used throughout the book to the detriment of a more in-depth analysis:

But I think you use too many devices (always remembering that I don’t approve of any of them) & will do till you get more work & can spread them fewer per building. None of this is insulting. I respect your work (& since reading your book, understand it more, which increases my respect) but disagree with it – mainly because I think there are other constraints acting upon us today. I like the things you like, have learned from them what you have taught, but I would apply the lessons differently.100

In a dialogue, if imaginary, with his future wife, Venturi replies on the margin of the letter: “You are mean.”

Problematizing the question of teaching / learning is essential for understanding Venturi’s stance in Complexity and Contradiction. Both the Gestalt and the behaviorist models of learning differ from the model of learning uncovered by Bourdieu through the concept of habitus. Gestalt emphasizes how the mind finds patterns in things, thus building the process of learning and particularly what is called insight – “the recognition by the subject of the relationships of different perceived objects.”101 (Some scholars have argued that, while the insight is a product of learning, it does not explain how one comes to recognize these relationships.102) The behaviorist model of learning is based on natural sciences and the direct connection between stimulus and response: exposed repeatedly to the same stimulus, the subject learns how to respond to it. Behaviorism attempts to demonstrate the existence of fixed routes that determine a response to a stimulus. Gestalt sees the impossibility of learning “as dependent upon any fixed and invariable

99 Venturi Scott Brown Collection at the Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. Box 70 225.II.F.1037 100 Ibid. 101 Robert Leeper, “The Relation between Gestalt Psychology and the Behavioristic Psychology of Learning,” Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science, Vol. 34 (Apr. 23-25, 1931): 269. 102 Ibid., 269 21

routes in the nervous system … .”103 Despite their differences, both psychologies emphasize learning as problem-solving through either perceptual or physiological mechanisms.

Relying on the perception of form (derived from Gestalt) and (indirectly) on the relationship between stimulus and response (found in behaviorism), the methodology exposed in Complexity and Contradiction privileges learning as problem-solving, but seems to overlook the form of learning implied through habitus: learning as discovery. While Venturi grounds the work of the architect in a particular world-view, his role, Venturi tells us from the first pages of the book, is ultimately to solve problems:

The doctrine “less is more” bemoans complexity and justifies exclusion for expressive purposes. It does, indeed, permit the architect to be highly selective in determining which problems he wants to solve. But if the architect must be committed to his particular way of seeing the universe, such a commitment surely means that the architect determines how problems should be solved, not that he can determine which of the problems he will solve.104

As Venturi explicitly declares his preference for Mannerism and Baroque, it is not just the ambiguity, the tension, and the variety of forms present in these stylistic movements that appeal to him, but – perhaps inadvertently – also a certain desire to overcome the monotony and dullness typically encountered toward the end of a stylistic era. An implicit comparison emerges between the height of Renaissance and the height of Modernism both of which, arriving at a stalemate, are seeking for change. In Mannerism, as in Venturi’s proposal, change is found in various forms of excess and overload. This position brackets the connotation aspect of signs and symbols and results in a reliance on their denotative aspect, the approach advocated by Venturi in the name of clarity and precision. However, is this truly clarity or perhaps an iteration of forms not unlike, though different from, the criticized modernist approach? In the words of art historian Leo Steinberg, this resembles a “domesticated state” fundamentally different form the original:

103 Ibid., 272. 104 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture 2nd edition, 17. 22

The mannerist … he who displays Michelangelo’s musculature over again, is not at all repeating Michelangelo, since what he arranges on the canvas lives already in the domesticated state. It had been won for art already.105

Moving forward past both Renaissance (though Mannerism) and Modernism, requires new forms of learning and Venturi’s first book also brings forth a model for architectural education that he will later develop with Denise Scott Brown in their subsequent studio work together. This model relies on learning through observation and collection of evidence (i.e. images), rather than learning through discovery. While the former requires objective proof, the latter implies the presence of mystery, never fully uncovered or explained. The former operates outside the habitus, the latter within it. The former teaches skills, the latter a way of thinking. It is the difference, pointed out by Leo Steinberg, between a Pollaiulo nude and a Bouguereau one:

The one [Pollaiulo’s] was born of nature’s union with an avid sensibility; the other makes a parade of a habitual skill. One says, pointing to the array of anatomic facts – “Here lies the mystery;” the other says – “Here lies no mystery, I know it all.”106

Disembodied images. As a display of (mostly) historical precedents, images in Complexity and Contradiction, act as signs and symbols that validate Venturi’s undertaking, also showing how relying on a “disembodied mind” results in disembodied signs and symbols. Less evident in this work than in subsequent writings of Venturi and Scott Brown, the excess of disembodied signs nonetheless exhausts the viewer’s ability to internalize and appropriate the images, which are used only as formal principles.

Lacking the underlying fabric of habitus, the photographs in Complexity and Contradiction become signs and symbols, stripped of the historical depth they claim to recover. Of the two hundred and fifty-three precedents in Complexity and Contradiction, only fifty-nine are buildings or artwork from the twentieth century, but the time-period or context are never identified. As Venturi resorts to history as a way of validating and legitimizing a new role of the architect, Bourdieu’s notion of field helps understanding this position. Critical in the constitution of the field are the mechanisms for constructing and protecting the definition of the artist or the

105 Leo Steinberg. “The Eye is a Part of the mind,” 295. 106 Leo Steinberg. “The Eye is a Part of the mind,” 295. 23

writer that come about through the struggles between authority and individual agents. Bourdieu identifies “three competing principles of legitimacy:” the recognition of the peers (art for art’s sake), the recognition bestowed by institutions (salons or academies), and the recognition granted by the public (lay audience).107 He situates the practices of artists and writers at the intersection of the “history of the positions they occupy,” i.e. the level of their recognition, and the” history of their dispositions,” i.e. their aspirations and expectations.108

Not unlike nineteenth-century artists seeking recognition in the Salon des Refuses, Venturi attempts to break away from the establishment – the “architectural bourgeoisie” and the institutions of his time – by re-organizing and re-assessing the system of architectural values, along with the definition and role of the architect. He resorts to history, largely abandoned during the height of modernism, as a validating authority. In this process, historical precedents are often reduced to flat images displayed on the pages of the book as signs and symbols that legitimize his new stance. In one of his interpretations of the everyday and the everydayness, Henri Lefebvre remarked that in the modern world “signs, rational in their way, are attached to things in order to convey the prestige of their possessors and their place in the hierarchy.”109 This statement offers an inadvertent explanation to the underlying theme of Venturi and Scott Brown’s famous diagram of a generic, non-descript building bearing the sign “I am a Monument.” (Figure 1.1.)

The first edition of Complexity and Contradiction, published in 1966 by The Museum of Modern Art (New York) in association with The Graham Foundation (Chicago) was followed in 1977 by the second edition, the one that has been reprinted frequently ever since. While the content stayed the same (except for two additional introductory notes in the second edition), the formats changed substantially. The second edition – the most well-known – is printed on landscape format and the images are significantly larger than those in the first edition, which was almost half the size of the second one.

The elegant page layout of the first edition was organized on a three-column grid and comprised three types of pages: text only (where the text occupies two columns) (Figure 1.2.);

107 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 51. 108 Ibid., 61. 109 Henri Lefebvre and Christine Levich, “The Everyday and the Everydayness,” Yale French Studies, No. 73 (1987): 7. 24

text + images (where two columns are occupied by text and one column by images) (Figure 1.3.); and image only (where the images are distributed on three columns) (Figure 1.4.). Identified by numbers corresponding to the numbers in the text and never by captions, the images are small and column-wide. Unlike the second edition, in the first one the text predominates. Small in size but numerous (three hundred and fifty altogether), the images do not communicate outside the text. Without an immediate identification and constrained to the same width, they remain anonymous. (The second edition will introduce individual captions.)

Of the two hundred and fifty-three images, more than half (one hundred and thirty-two) are photographs of exteriors of elevations. There are fifty-one interiors, fifty-one plans and site plans, and no more than eight sections. The images offer a rather flat background in a muted voice. Placed next to the text they turn into abstract signs. In an objective manner, they illustrate the claims made in the text, but fail to construct their own stories. Without a doubt, there exists a certain ambiguity – most likely deliberate – as to what they mean outside the text. The intriguing character of the visual discourse spawns primarily from the unexpected adjacencies of images. Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye appears next to Vanbrugh’s pavilions at Grimsthorpe and Bernini’s Palazzo Propaganda Fide (Figure 1.5.). The Lascaze and Howe’s PSFS Building in Philadelphia is next to the Karlskirche in Vienna (Figure 1.6.). Rauschenberg’s Pilgrim is adjacent to Katsura Imperial Villa (Figure 1.7.). The Church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, the Baoque chapel at Fresnes, and the Richards Medical Center are all on the same page (Figure 1.8.). However, the comparisons do not go any further and the visual discourse does not gain depth. It seems that what matters is the denotative aspect of images as illustrations of the text. Taken out of their own field, they remain remote objects, not unlike the images on slide projectors that generations of students were asked to identify during exams for architecture history courses.

Complexity and Contradiction generally received positive reviews. Writing for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Naomi Miller, an architectural historian at Boston University specializing in the Renaissance, welcomed the book as a “valuable guide to the architecture of the past – especially in terms of the present” while criticizing the small size of the images and the absence of labels.110 At the same time, she deemed Venturi’s use of his own

110 Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture reviewed by Naomi Miller, JSAH, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Dec., 1967): 318-319. 25

projects to illustrate architectural principles as the least successful aspect of the book.111 (Venturi wrote back to Miller to thank her for the review.112) Thirteen years after the publication of the book, Philip J. Finkelpearl, Venturi’s old friend from Princeton and by that time an English Professor at the University of Massachusetts, wrote a review of the work of Venturi and Scott Brown that included Complexity and Contradiction, Learning from Las Vegas, and several projects of the firm published in different professional journals.113 Finkelpearl’s central argument emphasized the consistency between theory and practice in the work of the team.

The abstract and disembodied character of signs appealed to Venturi and Scott Brown who will rely on this in their later projects as a team, as well as in theoretical writings. After Learning from Las Vegas (1972), their various collections of essays such as A View from the Campidoglio (1984), Iconography and Electronics upon a Generic Architecture (1996), Architecture as Signs and Systems (2004) all propose a view of architecture as shelter with added signs. However, the attitude towards signs and symbols was different in Venturi’s early projects. The work of Venturi and Rauch from the last chapter of Complexity and Contradiction, for instance, shown as evidence of applying in practice the theoretical principles presented in the previous chapters, proposes an approach to signs and symbols that is critical in nature and acknowledges their material presence. Unlike the display of historical precedents that, on the pages of the book, turn into disembodied signs, the use of signs in the projects of the firm raises valid concerns about how we communicate meaning and the nature of that communication. Two projects in particular (the 1962 renovation of the Grand’s restaurant and the 1966 Copley Square competition) demonstrate a critical use of signs in architecture.

One of Venturi and Rauch’s early projects was the remodeling of a family-owned restaurant in West Philadelphia. Catering to students, it occupied the unified ground floor of two adjacent row houses whose two upper levels were transformed into the family’s apartment. A particular feature of the place was the bearing wall separating the two original houses that was to be integrated into the new design (Figure 1.9.). For Venturi, the project was an opportunity to work with some of the principles he later articulated in his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: elements that were both functional and decorative (A/C ducts), ordinary and fancy

111 Ibid., 318. 112 http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/robert-venturi-letter-to-naomi-miller-6189 113 Philip J. Finkelpearl, “Contemporary Confrontations,” JSAH 38, No. 2 (May 1979): 203-205. 26

(Thonet chairs), cheap and elegant (industrial lighting fixtures), modest yet carefully designed (restaurant booths).114 The use of conventional elements in a way that made them acquire new meanings in a different context, exercised the Pop Art strategies that the architect so fondly adhered to. Venturi explicitly explored duality and unification, best illustrated through the relationship of the central bearing wall with new layout of the ground floor and through the exterior signs on the building.

Deliberately marked on the front façade, the wall separates the west side of the restaurant, which accommodates the main dining area, from the east side that houses the kitchen, services, counter and entry115 (Figure 1.10.). On the upper level, the wall unifies the two sides of the dwelling unit and disappears in the rhythmical row of windows (Figure 1.11.). Hand-written notes on the construction documents indicate the unifying treatment of the interior and exterior surfaces:

Furnish notes. Second and third floors

Exterior

 Scrape + paint all windows and other existing woodwork

 Front façade: paint (enamel) all brickwork

Interior

 Remove all wallpaper

 Paint all [illegible] and plaster

 All new walls and partitions plaster except as noted

 Existing doors may be re-used116

Venturi traced interpretations of duality throughout the history of art and architecture, from Piero della Francesca to Ellsworth Kelly and his approach to the design of Grand’s

114 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 112-113. 115 Ibid., 112. 116 Venturi and Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. 225.I.A.6107. 27

restaurant echoes his reading, published later in Complexity and Contradiction, of Louis Sullivan’s Farmers’ and Merchants’ Union Bank in Columbus, Wisconsin where

[t]he difficult duality is prominent. The plan reflects the bisected inside space, which accommodates the public and the clerks on different sides of the counter running perpendicular to the façade. On the outside the door and the window at grade reflect this duality: they are themselves bisected by the shafts above. But the shafts, in turn, divide the lintel into a unity of three with a dominant central panel. The arch above the lintel tends to reinforce duality because it springs from the center of the panel below, yet by its oneness and its dominant size it also resolves the duality made by the window and the door.117

Following the lesson of Sullivan, the distinctive feature of Grand’s restaurant is the play between a porcelain-enameled sign at the level of the second floor that spells, while separating, the name of the restaurant (Grand’s) and an over-sized cup marking the dividing wall on the main façade (Figure 1.12.). The color scheme highlights the intended duality with half of the sign blue and the other half yellow, while the cup made of colored “slices” blue on one side and yellow on the other, makes the transition between the two colors.118 The question of signs as decoration was a recurrent one in the work of the office and was part of contemporary explorations with lettering, stencils, and the ambiguity between words and images present in the explorations of visual artists such as Ed Ruscha or Jasper Johns. As “the function of this inscription is more ornamental in nature than informative,”

The information that comes across is the “sign-quality” of the bold characters as decoration – not the name of the establishment. In this way, the sign does ultimately follow the advertising principle of making a sign difficult to read to ensure that it will be read … .119

117 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed., 88. 118 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 112; Stanislaus von Moos, Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown: Buildings and Projects (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 299. 119 Von Moos, Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown: Buildings and Projects, 52. 28

Later removed from the façade, the cup was re-used above the portal of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art for the 1985 exhibition High Styles.120

What else is there to say? Made transparent, the meanings of the work seem to have been exhausted. Everything appears to be clear. The wall does cut open the ground floor, it does separate and expose its different functions while at the same time bringing them together. The sign on the façade does unify the two parts of the building while being itself cut in two by the oversized cup, which, in turn, marks the original dividing bearing wall (rather than the entrance), thus completing the story where it started.

However, these are not the main reasons that make the Grand’s Restaurant intervention a critical piece. It is critical because it questions the relationship between signified and signifier in architecture and the validity of too explicit narratives. Critique here does not infer that change in meaning occurs with the change in context or that double-functioning elements should be more present in the architectural vocabulary, to follow Venturi’s rhetoric, but rather argues for a type of architectural narrative that leaves the story open to interpretations the way the punch-line in a well-crafted joke reshuffles at the very end the anticipated meanings of the story. In several process drawings, the cup is rendered as a solid object hovering above pedestrians on the sidewalk (Figure 1.13). A section drawing shows it as big as almost two-thirds of the story height (Figure 1.14.). In an elevation drawing, the cup appears as standing on a pedestal, an impression resulted from the orthogonal projection. The illusion is deliberate: “The cup similarly attracts the eye by being unifying and disrupting at once. With it the sign evolves from two dimensions to three, so that it can be seen by pedestrians as they approach parallel to the façade, in contrast to the flat part of the sign which can be seen at a distance.”121

The cup embodies habits and a certain habitus of the place. In preliminary drawings and sketches, we see people go about their daily lives, hanging out in the restaurant booths, stretching, chitchatting or flirting (Figure 1.15). The modest neighborhood restaurant catering to students ironically bears the name “Grand,” an irony also reflected in the oversized illusion of a cup hanging off the main façade. The cup is not a cup, just as the Grand restaurant is not grand. While there is nothing majestic about the place, the sign twists the linear relationship between

120 Von Moos, Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown: Buildings and Projects, 299. 121 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed., 112. 29

signified and signifier. The cup no longer simply signifies in a humorous, if direct, way the use and the name of the place, but also points at – like Claes Oldenburg’s sculptures – the overwhelming, overbearing presence of our daily habits and everyday objects.

The 1966 entry for the Copley Square competition in Boston introduced, along with subtle ideas about play, density, and scale, explorations of symbolism and signage in relation to habitus (Figure 1.16). One of the starting points of the project was the architects’ insight that, despite hat is often stated, open space in the American city is not precious.122 Therefore, the square they proposed was not “an open space to accommodate non-existing crowds,” but a “non- piazza” based on a grid system intended to mirror the street-grid of Boston.123 The project offered a critique of the Italian piazza transplanted in an American context. Born from “our justifiable love for Italian towns,” the fascination with piazzas as open spaces does not, in fact, reflect the American way of life:

But the open piazza is seldom appropriate for an American city today except as a convenience for pedestrians for diagonal short-cuts. The piazza, in fact, is “un- American.” Americans feel uncomfortable sitting in a square: they should be working at the office or home with the family looking at television. Chores around the house or the weekend drive have replaced the passeggiata.124

In the design of the piazza, Venturi and his partners recognize and engage a different habitus of American life, namely its busyness, restlessness, and impatience. The empty space is deliberately filled in with a “non-dense matter, a consistent, but rich grid of trees.”125 The species selected (one Plane tree planted for every two Scholar trees) are chosen because their proportions are similar but their heights are different (the former is 35 feet higher than the latter).126 Thus, while the grid appears uniform, it provides, in fact, subtle variations: seen from afar, the trees

122 Ibid., 131. 123 Ibid., 129-131. 124 Ibid., 130. 125 Ibid., 129. 126 Ibid., 130. 30

read as a solid mass, whereas experienced from within their spacing allows light to filter through the canopies.127

Having his mind set on the critique of modern architecture, Venturi resorts to Philip Johnson’s text on the “seven crutches of Modern architecture,” suggesting that an eighth crutch could be that of “relationships,” which are not always all right.128 In a 1954 address at Harvard, Johnson warned architecture students not to fall for the easy justifications that supposedly make a good building: history, pretty drawings, utility, comfort, cheapness, serving the client, and structure. In this context, Venturi’s addition of “relationships” suggests that things (specifically the Trinity Church and the Boston Public Library) “don’t have to be ‘related’ in easy and obvious ways.”129 Along with ideas about complexity and the “obligation toward the difficult whole,” this seems to suggest an approach to signs and symbols that goes beyond their denotative aspect. Moreover, Venturi remarks: “when form follows function explicitly, the opportunities for implicit functions decrease.”130 Although his reading of Louis Sullivan is certainly reductive, Venturi attempts to embrace connotation as a richer and more generous alternative to the denotative aspect of the sign. So how does he do it? Venturi offers a critique of the linearity of meaning derived from denotation through the concept of play.

Play constitutes the key notion of the project. The concept of play has a long intellectual history. Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga has situated it at the core of civilization. He has argued that “culture arises in the form of play, that it is played from the very beginning,”131 which is different from proposing that every civilization simply reserves a provision of time for play. Play is part of rituals, contests, and competitions, it implies specific rules and laws, but also tension and uncertainty regarding the outcome.132 Through virtue, honor, nobility and glory that fall within the field of competition and play, the latter has a civilizing function.133 French sociologist Roger Caillois has built upon and distanced himself from Huizinga’s theories. Caillois identified several core-attributes of play: freedom, separation from routines, uncertainty,

127 Ibid., 129. 128 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed., 130. 129 Ibid., 130. 130 Ibid., 130. 131 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 46. 132 Ibid., 47-58. 133 Ibid., 64. 31

un-productivity, and governance by laws that suspend ordinary rules.134 For artistic practices, one of the most significant characteristics of play is the exercise of make-believe that creates imagined, not-yet there, but always possible, realities.

In Venturi’s project, play occurs between rules and exceptions, between large scale and small scale, between elevations and depressions in the topography. The Copley Square competition remains one of the few projects in which Venturi explicitly explores play not as a subspecies of irony, but rather as a thoughtful and creative complicity between designer and inhabitant. The game of make-believe is at work to create an imagined narrative for the future inhabitants. “To condense experience and make it more vivid, to pretend, that is, is as a characteristic of play: children play house. Adults play Monopoly.”135 Also specific to play (and lacking in modern architecture) is the “opportunity for choice and improvisation.”136

As an urban space, the project caters to both adults and children, and pays particular attention to the latter’s perception of space and their learning experience, hence a certain didactic character of the design. A miniature replica of the Trinity Church placed in front of the Trinity Church itself plays “sculpture for children.”137 Blocks made of pre-cast concrete create an artificial topography and receive inscriptions of nursey rhymes “cast into the concrete to interest children who cannot see over the blocks.”138 On the competition boards, a section drawing offers a glimpse into everyday life: next to the concrete blocks inscribed with “alphabet, numbers and nursery rhymes in giant incised characters,” a mother and child walk hand in hand (Figure 1.17.). Pointing to the blocks, the child exclaims: “Mommy, look at the A, B, C’s.” A nod, perhaps, to Roy Lichtenstein’s 1961 “Look Mickey!” – the Pop artist frequently referenced by Venturi – the drawing shows the multifaceted character of signs: described as incised fonts (rather than the detached billboards from later diagrams and studies), they possess a certain materiality; being oversized (not unlike the cup on the Grand’s restaurant façade), they become playful; showing the alphabet, they perform a didactic role.

134 Roger Caillois,Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1961). 135 Ibid., 130. 136 Ibid., 130. 137 Ibid., 130. 138 Ibid., 129. 32

Closely related to the idea of play and employed as the overarching principle of composition, the grid of the Copley Square project recovers a materiality and multi- dimensionality lost in Modern architecture and “allows for improvisation and variety of use.”139 (Figure 1.18.) Venturi worked the numerous study diagrams that preceded the final project through overlaying sheets of yellow trace paper. (Figure 1.19.) The “thickness” of the working process itself was eventually reflected in the design, which explored not a one-dimensional grid, but rather an overlapping of multiple veils. The studies show the transformation of rigid geometries into more sophisticated layers that account not simply for alley layouts but also for trees, various forms of vegetation, urban furniture, artificial topography. Venturi attempts to break away from the inflexible grid of the International Style conceptualized as one of the principles of Modern architecture in Henry-Russell Hitchcok and Philip Johnson’s seminal book.140 With the International Style, the grid has become a prescribed, a priori condition – a sign identifying a building as Modern. What Venturi explores, on the other hand, is the connotative aspect of this sign, the infinite possibilities embodied within the grid: “The grid, whether in the form and scale of the town plan or countryside of the American mid-west or the columned interiors of a mosque in Cairo or Cordova, allows for improvisation and variety of use.”141 He defines the character of the square as a “spatial plaid” or a “plaid pattern” which reveals itself in different ways from different distances and doesn’t necessarily relate explicitly to the near-by architectures of Richardson, and McKim, Mead, and White.142 He turns the abstraction of the grid as sign into a material texture that embodies ways of life and everyday practices. The project is also an opportunity for Venturi to address, as we will see later, ideas about the boring and the interesting.

Discursive images. Profusely illustrated, Complexity and Contradiction demonstrates that Less is a bore in the most obvious, if overlooked, way, through the numerous images acting as evidence of the claims made in the text.

139 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed., 130. 140 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style (New York: Norton, 1932). 141 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed., 130. 142 Ibid., 130. 33

As modernity advances, the desire for excess and overload aims to compensate for lack of meaningful experiences. The diversity of forms and products attempts to overcome the uniformity of meaning pervading the routines of life that unfolds between the linear rhythms of work and those no less linear of entertainment and distraction. Venturi, later with Denise Scott Brown, put a special emphasis on the infraordinary as the necessary source of inspiration for an architecture reflective of, and reflecting on, its time. From early architectural and urban design projects onward, the idea of the everyday was reinforced through imagery and theoretical stances. The ordinary takes two main directions in the work of Venturi and Scott Brown: on the one hand, there is the mundane of early projects that embraces images of domesticity (theorized mostly in Complexity and Contradiction). On the other hand, there is the everyday prevalent in later works that brings forth the consumerism of the commercial strip (brought to light in Learning from Las Vegas). The ordinary window (Vanna Venturi House, the Guild House), the ordinary frame construction (the Beach House, the North Penn Visiting Nurse Association, the Trubek House, the Wislocki Houses), the ordinary pitched roof, and ordinary materials evoke, even in public projects, the domesticity that modernism has hijacked from ordinary people (Figures 1.20-1.21.). Similarly, urban design projects aim to bring back the human scale along with a certain familiarity of objects and materials (the Copley Square Competition, the FDR Memorial competition). In later projects, Venturi and Scott Brown will bring forth the ordinary of the consumerist society: MERBISC Mart in California City (1970), the BASCO Showroom (1976), the Best Products Catalog Showroom (1978), the ISI Corporation Headquarters (1978) (Figures 1.22-1.23.).

Evidence of Venturi and Scott Brown’s concerted efforts to extract and apply the values of the everyday is consistent throughout their work and begins years before the publication of Learning from Las Vegas. In the foreword to the first edition of Complexity and Contradiction, Arthur Drexler, then the Director of the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA, noticed “Venturi’s delight in reality – especially in those recalcitrant aspects most architects would seek to suppress or disguise.”143 Throughout the book, Venturi argued for a re-evaluation of the ordinary: “An architect should use convention and make it vivid. I mean he should use convention unconventionally. … The main justification for honky-tonk elements in architectural

143 Arthur Drexler, “Foreword,” in Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st edition (New York: MOMA, 1966): 9. 34

order is their very existence.”144 Writing in 1969 with Scott Brown in defense of Edwin Lutyens’s architecture, he wrote: “Commercial strip architecture and Lutyens’s houses are relevant to an architecture of meaning.”145 An advocate of non-judgmental perspectives on the built and social environment, Denise Scott Brown proposed that “Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Levittown, the swinging singles on the Westheimer Strip, golf resorts, boating communities, Co- op City, the residential backgrounds to soap operas, TV commercials and mass mag ads, billboards and Route 66 are sources for a changing architectural sensibility.”146 It is in Learning from Las Vegas that they assume and celebrate Phillip Johnson’s earlier description of their work, intended to be critical and dismissive, as being “ugly and ordinary.” Embracing these attributes, they turn them rhetorically into desired objectives rather than the harsh criticism originally intended.147 Following the publication of Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi wrote the article “A Definition of Architecture as Shelter with Decoration on It, and Another Plea for a Symbolism of the Ordinary in Architecture” in which, using a sequence of six comparisons, he attempted to justify the use of ordinary symbolism in architecture.148

Despite the couple’s interest in the quotidian, critiques are made that in the work of Venturi and Scott Brown the everyday lacked a structured theoretical base. Deborah Fausch proposed that “if Venturi and Scott Bown’s diverse responses to the problem of an ‘architecture of the everyday’ lacked a formal conceptual apparatus, they did possess a loose coherency.”149 The prevalence of the quotidian makes it a challenging concept to frame, hence the unclear stance of Venturi and Scott Brown.150 The culmination of their position on the everyday was demonstrated in the Signs of Life exhibition that the two curated at the request of the Smithsonian Institution for the Bicentennial of the American Revolution in 1976. The show presented an overwhelming collection of images of the everyday landscape in mid-century America: the city

144 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed., 42. 145 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, “Learning from Lutyens” in A View from the Campidoglio, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1984), 20. 146 Denise Scott Brown, “Learning from Pop,” in A View from the Campidoglio, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1984), 26. The essay was first published in 1971. 147 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1984), 128. 148 Venturi and Scott Brown, A View from the Campidoglio, 62-67. 149 Deborah Fausch, The Meaning of Context Is Everyday Life, Ph.D. dissertation (Princeton University, 1999): 218. 150 Fausch, The Meaning of Context Is Everyday Life, 217-218. 35

street, the highway, the commercial strip, and the suburb.151 (Figures 1.24.) (Spawned from the exhibition and the years of research that preceded it, a manuscript for a forthcoming book was never published.) The exhibition received mixed reviews and “the majority of the architectural press expressed its bafflement and incomprehension with the inductive, anthropological aggregation of examples in ‘Signs of Life’.”152

Analyzing the politics of display in Signs of Life, Deborah Fausch wrote:

This paratactic mode of exposition, which built up examples without explicitly disclosing the principle connecting them, was not without its own inductive logic: the first reports of a fascination for this visual material in the earliest drafts of the manuscript yielded, in the final draft, to an organization by subheading broken up into text and illustration captions. Thus it is clear that the stylistic predilection for the assemblage of particulars revealed more than merely an aesthetic; it also entailed a form of logical construction in which the example was adduced as proof.153

Ten years apart, Signs of Life and Complexity and Contradiction shared similar approaches in their construction of the visual discourse, also present in Learning from Las Vegas (particularly in the second edition of the book that followed more closely the intentions of the authors154). The display strategies in the exhibition find an early precursor in the photographic display in the book. While the everyday itself might appear banal, boring, and irrelevant, one way to elevate it from the lowbrow to the highbrow is through its representation as sheer quantity. The numbing of senses resulted from the accumulation of “stuff” puts a distance between the viewer and the ordinary objects or scenes represented, which otherwise belong to the invisible realm of the everyday. Less is a bore reveals not only a discontent with the modernist minimalist aesthetic, but also the less explicit desire underlying the ethos of the time to re-examine the more of the everyday.

151 For a detailed analysis of the exhibition, its policies of display, and echoes in the popular and professional press, see Fausch, The Meaning of Context Is Everyday Life. 152 Fausch, The Meaning of Context Is Everyday Life, 233. 153 Ibid., 228. 154 For a detailed discussion on the book design in the first and second editions, see Aron Vinegar, I am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2008). 36

The question of boredom and the boring was central in visual arts in the 1950s and 1960s and directly related to the everyday. Venturi and Scott Brown drew heavily on the art scene of the era. Pop Art embraced the everyday and Minimalism appropriated boredom as means to revitalize artistic sensibilities. On the one hand, championing Pop Art, Andy Warhol famously declared “I like boring things,” a statement quoted as a motto in the chapter “Ugly and Ordinary Architecture or the Decorated Shed” from Learning from Las Vegas. On the other hand, minimalist Donald Judd claimed that “A work needs only to be interesting.”155 Pop Art and Minimalism had in common a shift in the nature of emotions and posed a new problem in art: reversing the modernist model, artists sought to produce emotion without representing it. In doing so, they offered the viewers exactly the distance from the everyday life they needed to have insights into their own emotions.156

Judd’s and Warhol’s task was to create work that did not promise to distract, nor claim to represent repressed feelings (like Abstract Expressionism), but instead create a space in which one’s affective experience of everyday life could come into being. By mimicking the lack of affect that one might feel toward the everyday world of things and images, … Judd’s and Warhol’s works allows boredom … to come into existence as such. And then something interesting happens: different boredom emerges, one that is “an apogee of mental relaxation” rather than withdrawal.157

Central for understanding the complexity and elusiveness of the everyday are the writings of Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre. De Certeau’s primary interest resides in exploring how people, “commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules,” take ownership of their everyday practices, spaces, language, in other words how they act on a daily basis.158 Henri Lefebvre’s examination of the everyday, on the other hand, ties together boredom, modernity, and the everyday.

De Certeau places how live people in opposition with the rules imposed by various establishments and sees them primarily as subversive practices of resistance. “Everyday life,” he

155 Frances Colpitt, “The Issue of Boredom: Is It Interesting,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, No. 4 (Summer 1985): 359. 156 Johnathan Flatley, “Allegories of Boredom,” in A Minimal Future: Art as Object 1958-1968, ed. Ann Goldstein (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2004), 52. 157 Ibid., 53. 158 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xi. 37

writes, “invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.”159 In order to distinguish between the rules received from top down and life practices, he proposes to differentiate between strategies and tactics. Both strategies and tactics have a strong grounding in spatial practices.

A strategy, according to De Certeau, becomes possible when a structure of power (such as the political establishment, an institution, an administrative body, etc.) isolates itself from the environment, delineates its own place, and generates rules that the others have to abide by.160 A tactic, on the other hand, belongs to those who do not have a circumscribed spatial or institutional localization, “insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance.”161 In other words, strategies are imposed top-down by various forms of institutions, whereas tactics are generated bottom-up by the weak, the marginalized, the powerless. De Certeau observes that the most common everyday activities, such as walking, talking, reading, cooking, etc., are tactical. People adapt and adjust to their environment, detect clues, make decisions, and move forward based on a logic that interprets the events and thus seizes opportunities. A similar distinction between “strong” and “weak” modes of operation proposed the philosopher Isaiah Berlin in 1953. He described the two major forms of thinking as the hedgehog and the fox: the former functions according to one big overarching idea (like Plato, Dante, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky), whereas the latter draws from multiple experiences (Aristotle, Shakespeare, Balzac, Joyce).162

Venturi’s position toward modern architecture criticizes its principles-turned-strategies abiding by a limited set of governing rules. As a way to revitalize architecture, he proposes to discover the tactics of the everyday and embrace their variety. Each chapter in Complexity and Contradiction and most of the images, celebrate design tactics, as opposed to strategies: “Ambiguity,” “The Phenomenon of ‘Both-And’ in architecture,” “The Double-Functioning Element,” “Contradiction Adapted,” “Contradiction Juxtaposed,” etc. Venturi recognizes the value of what philosopher Charles Peirce has called “abductive reasoning,” a form of logic based on inference, on the most probable, though not always demonstrable, leap from observation to

159 Ibid., xii. 160 Ibid., xix. 161 Ibid., xix. 162 Isaiah Berlin, The Fox and the Hedgehog: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1953). 38

conclusion. Thus Venturi proposes that architecture should not apply predefined rules, but rather examine present conditions and re-shuffle them into new meanings. The firm’s 1979 intervention in Jim Thorpe, a small town in Pennsylvania, was specifically described in terms of tactics such as conversions, restorations, paving, street furniture, etc. that resulted in a successful revitalization of the town.163 Tactics as prevalent modes of operation also became integral to the family life of the Venturi and Scott Brown couple. In an article first published in 1983 that analyzed the challenges face by architects and planners confronted with the changing dynamics of modern family life, Scott Brown described their own life as an “ersatz family” in which friends, students, fellow architects, and neighbors substituted the “real” family scattered all around the world:

Bob and I have a joint career in child-raising, home-making, architecture and urban planning. … There is no clear seam between our work and family lives, both because we prefer it that way and because it makes our lives possible. … We have a housekeeper who lives in during the week. She has been with us more than ten years, is a grandmother, and is virtually a third parent in our household. We rent a small apartment in our basement to an architecture student who partly pays his rent by helping around the house and yard. … [t]wo elderly ladies help out on occasion, and the cook in our local restaurant uses his spare time in the afternoon to fetch our child from school and do the ferrying that suburban mothers do.164

Several questions must be raised. As Bourdieu has shown, habitus generates meaningful practices not because it is taught or prescribed, but precisely because it is tacit and embodied in the everyday. Tactics require a form of imagination that appropriates the banal and the boring of the quotidian and finds creative ways to give them new meanings. This is one of Venturi’s objectives in Complexity and Contradiction which will later become a central concern of the Venturi-Scott Brown team. However, doesn’t the inherent nature of the everyday make tactics impossible to systematize? Once structured, don’t they, perhaps, turn into strategies? The richness of ideas brought to light in Complexity and Contradiction is without a doubt refreshing

163 James Steele, “Living the Legend in Philadelphia,” in Architectural Monographs no.21: Venturi Scott Brown and Associates – On Houses and Housing (London: Academy Editions, 1992), 8. 164 Denise Scott Brown, “Changing Family Forms,” in Architectural Monographs no.21: Venturi Scott Brown and Associates – On Houses and Housing. (London: Academy Editions, 1992), 109. First published in 1983. 39

and fertile, but once they are institutionalized, structured, and scientifically “named” do they still have the power to operate as tactics? Will they not, eventually, join the stale rules of modernism that they originally attempted to subvert? Tactics turn into strategies when abductive reasoning loses its bodily dimension and uses disembodied signs and symbols. Part of de Certeau’s critique of the everyday addresses the overemphasis of modern society on visual stimuli: “From TV to newspapers, from advertising to all sorts of mercantile epiphanies, our society is characterized by a cancerous growth of vision, measuring everything by its ability to show or be shown and transmuting communication into a visual journey.”165

Henri Lefebvre summarized the difference between traditional and modern societies through the idea of diversity, inherently present in the former, but lacking in the latter. This lack of diversity, however, remains disguised behind a mask that offers infinite options and possibilities. He wrote:

Before the series of revolutions which ushered in what is called the modern era, housing, modes of dress, eating and drinking – in short, living – presented a prodigious diversity. … The diversity has never been well acknowledged or recognized as such; it has resisted a rational kind of interpretation which has only come about in our time by interfering with and destroying that diversity. Today we see a worldwide tendency to uniformity. Rationality dominates, accompanied but not diversified by irrationality.166

This uniformity and lack of diversity is the boredom of modernity resulting from the autonomy of forms, functions, and structures, once forming an undifferentiated whole that constructed the fabric of life itself.167 Now overstated, over-explained, and over-exposed, forms, functions, and structures have become transparent, losing the overarching symbolic meaning and the ability to construct a unified whole.168 The result is the advent of autonomous sub-systems, each confronted with an only apparent, in fact arranged, diversity.169 Underlying these

165 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xxi. 166 Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness,” 7. 167 “Things as well as institutions, ‘objects’ as well as ‘subjects’ offered up to the senses accessible and recognizable forms. People … performed various functions, some of them psychological (eating, drinking, sleeping), others social (working, traveling). Structures … allowed for the public or private performance of these functions … .” (Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness,” 7.) 168 Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness,” 8. 169 Ibid., 8. 40

circumstances is the emergence of boredom, which enters each of these sub-domains and its products, from architecture to industrially produced foods, and the culture of automobile: “… in the domain of architecture, a variety of local, regional, and national architectural styles has given way to “architectural urbanism,” a universalizing system of structures and functions in supposedly rational geometric forms.”170

In concert with Bourdieu’s habitus and its paradoxical definition around opposites, Lefebvre defines the everyday as

a set of functions which connect and join together systems that might appear to be distinct. … The everyday is therefore the most universal and the most unique condition, the most social and the most individuated, the most obvious and the best hidden. … The concept of everydayness does not therefore designate a system, but rather a denominator common to existing systems including judicial, contractual, pedagogical, fiscal, and police systems.171

Situating the everyday in the larger context of the consumerist society, Lefebvre brings forth two interconnected concepts: abundance and planned obsolescence.172 They account for both the excess of products and their brief life, in short for the boredom inherent to the modern world where consumers constantly chase the newest and trendiest merchandise in the form of physical goods or abstract ideas. Making an argument for the study of the banal in a world where everything eventually becomes obsolete and transitory, Lefebvre invites one to change the terms of discussion and uncover the relevance of the overlooked, the dull, and the boring: “Banality? Why should the study of the banal itself be banal? … Why wouldn’t the concept of everydayness reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary?”173

Lefebvre introduces two ideas that help us conceptualize boredom in relation to the elusive notion of the everyday: repetition and passivity. Thus he distinguishes between cyclical and linear repetition, where the former refers to the cycles of days, seasons, crops, life and death,

170 Ibid., 8. 171 Ibid., 9. 172 “A condition stipulated for the legibility of forms, ordained by means of functions, inscribed within structures, the everyday constitutes the platform upon which the bureaucratic society of controlled consumerism is erected. … Abundance – a rational, programmed abundance and planned obsolescence – replacing shortage in the first world … .” Ibid., 9. 173 Ibid., 9. 41

and the latter implies “the repetitive gestures of work and consumption.”174 In the modern world, he argues, “the repetitive gestures tend to mask and to crush the cycles.”175 This distinction illuminates a critical aspect of the relationship between boredom and repetition: repetition turns into boredom when it is linear, when subjects fail to take into account the world at large and their positioning within it. As Elizabeth Goodstein remarked in her investigation of modernity and boredom, the experience of boredom developed not from the rhythms of pre-industrialized societies (cyclical repetition), but “in response to the superabundance of stimulation, the superfluity of possibilities for personal achievement, the sheer excess of transformation, offered by the modern city.”176 Thus boredom became an ominous presence in the city life.

Boredom is both an urban and a suburban phenomenon, manifested either as frustration or as disenchantment.177 In 1903, Georg Simmel identified the “blasé attitude” as a phenomenon specific to urbanity, growing from the “rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting stimulations of the nerves.”178 As a consequence, things themselves appear “in an evenly flat and grey tone,” in other words boredom prevails. At the turn of the 20th century, fiction ties together the city, the everyday, and boredom. Sherlock Holmes’ rejection, on the one hand, and astute observation, on the other, of the everyday in Arthur Conan Doyle’s series, presents an everyday tedium resulted from seriality.179 Seriality is another way of describing Lefebvre’s notion of linear repetition.

Passivity, the other important concept that Lefebvre proposes, and more specifically organized passivity, engenders boredom at all levels of human life: leisure presents the spectators with images they cannot appropriate; workers have no decision-making power in the workplace; the imposition of consumption through advertising preempts private life.180 Modernity distorts the relationship of work and leisure. “The form of free-time busy-ness necessarily corresponds to

174 Ibid., 10. 175 Ibid., 10. 176 Elizabeth Goodstein, Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 19. 177 Geoffrey Clive, “A Phenomenology of Boredom,” Journal of Existentialism, Vol. V, No. 20 (Summer 1965): 360. 178 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Nabu, 2012), 26. 179 Laurie Langbauer, Novels of Everyday Life: The Series in English Fiction, 1850-1930 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 131. 180 Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness,” Yale French Studies, 10. 42

the form of business.”181 Modern forms of entertainment such as television, radio, advertising, and movies keep people in a state of perpetual agitation.182 Leisure turns into entertainment and, although apparently opposed to work, they are both disengaging, pass-time activities.183 Joseph Pieper has argued for an understanding of leisure as contemplative activity that is not dissociated from work – a status lost, however, in modernity with the split between work and leisure.184 Pieper defines boredom as the “inability to enjoy leisure; for one can only be bored if the spiritual power to be leisurely has been lost.”185 The excess of leisure time torments the modern man just as much as the Marxist alienating labor.186 Writing a literary history of boredom as a state of mind, Patricia Meyer-Spacks has identified the split between work and leisure that took place in the 18th and 19th centuries as one of the four major causes of the emergence of boredom in modernity.187 The modern disenchantment with the world thus affects the structures of habitus, which in turn changes the practices of everyday life.

In the mid-decades of the twentieth century, boredom was experienced as a discontent with everyday life across spaces, geographies, art forms, literary genres, and disciplines. Boredom is a state of mind and a situation,188 a subjective, as well as an environmental matter. It was declared “an aesthetic or intellectual or emotional category, not an ethical one.”189 As such, it became a topic of interest not only in visual arts, but also in poetry, fiction, and film.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,

we ourselves flash and yearn,

181 Siegfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction” in The Mass Ornament (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 325. 182 Siegfried Kracauer, “Boredom” in The Mass Ornament (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 331. 183 Patricia Meyer Sacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 250. 184 Joseph Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (New York: Random House, 1963). 185 Ibid., 59. 186 Clive, “A Phenomenology of Boredom,” 359. 187 The others are the decline of Christianity that conjured up disinterest in after-life along with an increased importance of everyday life; the advent of individual rights that infers people’s right not to be bored – an idea marking a postmodern moment; lastly, the rise of individualism that brings forth a sense of entitlement along with a focus on inner experience. (Meyer Sacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind, 17-24.) 188 Clive, “A Phenomenology of Boredom,” 359. 189 Meyer Sacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind, 252. 43

and moreover my mother told me as a boy

(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored

means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no

inner resources, because I am heavy bored.190

Alberto Moravia, known to his friends as a perpetual victim of boredom, published in 1960 the novel La Noia, originally translated as The Empty Canvas, most likely out of fear that a direct translation – Boredom – would not appeal to an English-speaking audience.191 The neurotic love of Dino, a disenchanted urban painter, for Cecilia, a girl whom he fails to know beyond their sexual encounters, develops at the same time with his indifference toward and disengagement with, himself and the world.192

“We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. … we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry,” declared a precursor of the Situationists in 1953.193 “What currently marks our public life, is boredom. The French are bored.,” wrote the journalist Pierre Viansson-Ponte in the March 15, 1968 issue of Le Monde.

190 John Berryman, “Dream Song 14,” in Seventy-Seven Dream Songs. New York: Farrar, 1964. 191 “But, on encountering him, I would first, automatically, ask him how he was. ‘Mi annoio,’ he would usually reply, in his clipped, telegraphic way.” (William Weaver, “Introduction,” in Alberto Moravia, Boredom (New York: New York Review of Books, 1999 [1960], vi.) 192 “The feeling of boredom originates for me in a sense of the absurdity of a reality which is insufficient, or anyhow unable, to convince me of its own effective existence. For example, I may be looking with some degree of attentiveness at a tumbler. As long as I say to myself that this tumbler is a glass or metal vessel made for the purpose of putting liquid into it and carrying it to one’s lips without upsetting it – as long as I am able to represent the tumbler to myself in a convincing manner – so long shall I feel that I have some sort of a relationship with it, a relationship close enough to make me believe in its existence and also, on a subordinate level, in my own. But once the tumbler withers away and loses its vitality in the manner I have described, or, in other words, reveals itself to me as something foreign, something with which I have no relationship, once it appears to me as an absurd object – then from that very absurdity springs boredom, which when all is said and done is simply a kind of incommunicability and the incapacity to disengage oneself from it. … For me, therefore, boredom is not only the inability to escape from myself but is also the consciousness that theoretically I might be able to disengage myself from it, thanks to a miracle of some sort.” (Moravia, Boredom, 5-6) 193 Ivan Chtcheglov, “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” in Situationist International Anthology, trans. and ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), I-4. 44

A certain impatience specific to moments of crisis, along with an undeniable sense of breaking moral barriers, transpires from Venturi’s text. “Architects can no longer afford to be intimidated by the puritanically moral language of orthodox Modern architecture,” he states in his “gentle manifesto.”194 While criticizing the revolutionary Modern movement, Venturi nonetheless proposes his own revolution, quoting from Christopher Alexander’s Notes from a Synthesis of Form: “At the same time that the problems increase in quantity, complexity, and difficulty, they also change faster than before.”195 This sense of speed and restlessness is implicit in the wording of phrases, in the short, alert, well-constructed sentences, in the quick leaps between different precedents, different ideas, different critiques. A few examples of those that abound in the text:

I welcome the problems and exploit the uncertainties. By embracing contradiction as well as complexity, I am for vitality as well as validity.196

Ambiguity and tension are everywhere in an architecture of complexity and contradiction. Architecture is form and substance – abstract and concrete – and its meaning derives from its interior characteristics and its particular context. An architectural element is perceived as form and structure, texture and material.197

Much of the function of ornament is rhetorical – like the use of Baroque pilasters for rhythm, and Vanbrugh’s disengaged pilasters at the entrance to the kitchen court at Blenheim which are an architectural fanfare. The rhetorical element which is also structural is rare in Modern architecture, although Mies has used the rhetorical I-beam with an assurance that would make Bernini envious.198

As in the preliminary scheme of Kahn’s Unitarian Church in Rochester, the residual spaces are closed. In contrast, the linings of columns and piers in SS. Sergius and Bacchus, St. Stephen Walbrook, Vierzehnheiligen, and Neresheim define residual spaces

194 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 16. 195 Ibid., 16 196 Ibid., 16 197 Ibid., 20. 198 Ibid., 40. 45

which open on the dominant spaces, although they are separate from them in varying degrees.199

Eager to change the architectural products of repetitive habits, Venturi proposes a quick remedy. However, to those who treat the everyday with impatience, attempting to change life quickly, Lefebvre responded:

… transforming the everyday requires certain conditions. A break with the everyday by means of festival – violent or peaceful – cannot endure. In order to change life, society, space, architecture, even the city must change.200

Although never referenced directly, habitus is a looming presence in Venturi’s early work. While in Bourdieu’s definition, habitus is a physical embodiment of cyclically repetitive practices, Venturi approaches it as a mere repetition of gestures without content, as empty habit, which he identifies as one of the core issues of modern architecture. In the first edition of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Venturi’s motto Less is a bore underlies the overall organization of the visual discourse. The disconnect between writing and illustrations results in images that act as disembodied signs and symbols, lying flat on the page. Influenced by pedagogical principles derived from Gestalt and behaviorism (particularly the stimulus – response model), Venturi attempts to change architectural practices, but overlooks the embodied nature of habitus.

199 Ibid., 78-80. 200 Ibid., 11. 46

1.2. Boredom in midcentury architectural thought

The critique of modern living and, implicitly modern architecture, as boring permeates architectural practice during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

The discontent with modern architecture is at work in the writings and design proposals of the Austrian-born architect Josef Frank. One of the pioneers of the modernist movement in Austria, in 1933 Frank immigrated to Sweden where he stayed until 1939 when he moved to New York and lived there during the war years. Back to Stockholm in 1946, somewhat isolated from the main architectural circles in the country, and increasingly dissatisfied with modernist architecture, he began experimenting with theoretical projects to counteract the dullness of the post-war mass-produced architecture.201 Shortly after his return to Stockholm in the mid-1940s, Frank was already manifesting his longing for the raw vitality of New York in contrast with the monotony of the European cities.202 He wrote in a letter:

I am now preoccupied here with the problem of boredom in art and architecture. Why, one must ask oneself, are the streets and dwellings here so uninteresting? … What good is the art here and carefulness in building if everything is so dull. I am now completely of the opinion that much that is good comes about merely through chance and not through careful planning.203

He will further elaborate on the notion of chance in the essay “Accidentism,” published in Swedish in 1958 in the journal Form. For Frank “chance” or “accidentism” does not imply randomness and, I suggest, it is directly related to the notion of habit. Criticizing the “so-called designer” for assuming the task of continuously searching for innovation, Frank is condemning, in fact, the idea of perpetual change as an antidote to boredom, along with added decoration as an escape from the impasse of style.204 He acknowledges the cyclical nature of various styles in history and observes that the staleness of the rigid laws which “soon become monotonous and

201 Josef Frank and Mikael Bergquist, Accidentism: Josef Frank (Basel: Birkhauser, 2016), 11. 202 Ibid., 15. 203 Ibid., 15. 204 “These activities transform everything into fashion items, which in turn influence the art created in its surrounding environment. Fashion sensations are … extremely seductive, as they can relieve the monotony inherent in the standardization necessitated by mass production.” (Frank, Accidentism, 19). 47

dull” is usually overcome through a variety “achieved by enriching the forms with the help of decorations and playful constructions.”205

What modern architecture is lacking with the logic of its flat roofs, is the “irrational space full of mystery” of the attic.206 The same year Frank published “Accidentism,” philosopher Gaston Bachelard published in French The Poetics of Space, his phenomenological study on house and inhabitation.207 Bachelard’s house is a place for day-dreaming situated between the dark, irrational space of the cellar and the more luminous, rational space of the attic.208 The presence of the childhood attic as the room for solitude and imagination, Bachelard maintains, remains imprinted into one’s memory forever:

… even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. … In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, … the attic is at once small and large, warm and cool, always comforting.209

Frank’s critique of modern architecture echoes Bachelard’s proposition, perhaps unknowingly. Frank dreams of an architecture with “rooms that allow scope for the imagination” and of cities with streets “that are something other than simply traffic problems.”210 For him, people’s everyday life and habits offer the necessary resources to overcome both uniformity and ephemeral fashions. What he calls “accidents” are not exceptions to rules or formal figures within a field, but rather the coagulation of events, practices, individual choices and preferences that constitute one’s life and which manifest themselves through architecture.

A sitting room in which one can live and think freely is neither beautiful, nor harmonious, nor photogenic. It is the result of a series of random accidents; it is never

205 Frank, Accidentism, 21-22. 206 Ibid., 21. 207 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space 4th edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994) [1st edition 1958; 1st English edition 1964]. 208 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 19-20. 209 Ibid., 10. 210 Frank, Accidentism, 22. 48

really completed and it has sufficient scope to include whatever may be needed to satisfy its owner’s shifting requirements.211

Decrying the modern uniformity resulted from ideology, Frank envisions an “environment that appears to have arisen by accident.”212 Frank’s “accidents” are not merely formal structures with a spatial dimension that create a tension / contrast within a uniform field, but rather places resulting from the accumulation in time of practices of inhabitation, from everyday things and customs. For Frank, the answer to the question of architectural boredom resides not in the search of the exceptional, but in the careful examination of habits, daily routines, and commonplaces.

Frank constructs a different meaning of “accident” from the one that Venturi suggests, for instance, in his firm’s 1965 project for three buildings for a town in Ohio (the town hall, Y.M.C.A., and the extension of the public library). The windows punched on the free-standing wall that constitutes the front façade of the YMCA building construct a rather uniform field: “The relationship of the openings which are the dominant elements of the façade make up a relatively constant rhythm without focus in the center or emphasis at the terminations.”213 A secondary, more irregular rhythm of the building-proper behind reads as a “contrapuntal juxtaposition” against the uniformity of the front façade.214

In 1955, architect Bernard Rudofsky published Behind the Picture Window – a series of essays on everyday life in the United States whose concluding chapter, tellingly titled “On Boredom and Disprivacy,” criticized the modern house as being conducive to solitude, alienation, and boredom. Transparency of the walls along with the noises of the mechanical systems of the house, Rudofsky argued, prevent people from building intimacy, conversation, and a sense of privacy. His answer to the problem of modern boredom was the return to the house as an instrument for living that would replace the machine for living dear to modern architects from Le Corbusier onward. He associated that distinction with the difference between

211 Ibid., 20. 212 Ibid., 24. 213 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 126. 214 Ibid., 126. 49

“playing a violin and a jukebox.”215 In other words, while the machine responds to external stimuli received from the user (such as pushing the button of the jukebox) and generates the same response no matter who the user is, the instrument is attuned to the rhythms and bodily movement specific to each player.

As boredom inflicts itself on people’s lives, the easiest way out appears to be a quick change – just as Arthur Townsend, Henry James’s character from Washington Square, frequently changed his residence, so does the modern man falsely believes that his problems will be solved through trading his house for another one – perhaps, bigger, yet so similar. Rudofsky echoes here Kierkegaard’s reflections on boredom.216 Kierkegaard criticized an extensive response to boredom that involved a variation of the surface rather than a deeper and more substantial change: bored with the countryside, he argued, people move to the city; bored with their native lands, people go abroad; bored with Europe, they travel to America; bored with eating on porcelain, they eat on silver.217 Instead, he suggested, limitations and restraints make one more resourceful and more creative.218 Similarly, Rudofsky noticed that modern “man’s periodical changes of address are no more than futile attempts to escape the boredom of his environment.”219

Rudofsky’s later studies on footwear and clothing reflect the same concern for nurturing not ephemeral fashions, but the particulars of the human body. He argued that while “primitive man” has and sticks to an unchanging body ideal, “industrial man” has vague and unclear tastes and objectives.220 The reason for his unsettling attitude is boredom:

… the factor that goes farthest to account for this unholy obsession is his boredom. Bored with the natural shape of his body, he delights in getting away from himself, and to judge from past and former performance, the resources at hand for making his escape are

215 Bernard Rudofsky, Behind the Picture Window (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 201. 216 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/ Or, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 217 Ibid. I 263, 291-292. 218 Ibid., I 264, 292. 219 Rudofsky, Behind the Picture Window, 198. 220 Rudofsky, “The Fashionable Body,” in The Unfashionable Human Body (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1971), 93. (First published in Horizon, Autumn 1971, Vol. XIII, No.4.) 50

inexhaustible. … instead of striving for perfection he is consumed by a passion for unceasing experimentation. Only rarely does he exercise self-restraint.221

For Rudofsky, the man dwells in his clothes the same way he dwells in his house, hence the overarching theme of boredom extends from impersonal mechanized houses to impersonal fashions.

Whether deliberately paraphrasing Rudofsky’s Behind the Picture Window, or simply voicing a common concern of the time, John Keats’s novel The Crack in the Picture Window from 1956 was an open critique of American post-war suburban developments.222 A journalist and writer, Keats based his novel on various articles and books published from 1947 through 1955, and identified the main problems of suburban sprawl: financial machinations, land speculation, manipulation through advertisement, bad design, lack of a true sense of community. The book follows the Drones – John, Mary and their two children – as they move to the suburbs in search of a better life but are trapped in an existence of boredom, monotony, and financial debt. They are no different from their neighbors – the Amiables, the Fecunds, the Wilds – all living in identical houses, with identical picture windows, and equipped with identical furniture and appliances bought under the influence of advertising.

The house proves inadequate for the family of four: brand new, but poorly finished, small and inefficient. It becomes Mary’s arch-nemesis as she struggles to make a comfortable life for her family. Mary herself is far from resourceful, she blindly follows the initiatives and customs of the other homemakers in the development. Her main problem – boredom – seems to find its cure with the advent of the latest fad: the television set, which, eventually, only reinforces the loop of ennui:

Lacking stimulation from their neighbors …, oppressed by ennui, development people turn to the mass communication media to find new ideas. Then, because everyone sees the same TV shows, reads the same article in the same magazine, they all come up with the same idea at the same time, and the result is more ennui.223

221 Ibid., 94. 222 John Keats, The Crack in the Picture Window, Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, 1956. 223 Ibid., 81. 51

The ennui settles in surreptitiously not only as a visual trap, but also as a multi-sensorial tedium. In front of their TV sets, all families eat the same Yummy Gummy mix that comes in “six distinctively similar flavors” creating the illusion of diversity while, in fact, allowing “gustatorial boredom” to settle in.224 Any relief from boredom is temporary. People make home improvements based on other people’s ideas, buy the same gadgets as the neighbors, attend the same parties, or take on a hobby imposed by someone else. When Mary seeks medical advice for the unhappy state she find herself in, the local psychiatrist, Dr. Sly, explains to her that there is nothing wrong, she is simply bored, just like himself and everyone else.225 For Dr. Sly, boredom is no longer a disease, but rather a natural state of mind. For the Drones, the solution appears to be moving away to a more expensive, yet predictably similar development where the exact same problems will soon surface in their lives. Unknowingly, they resort to what Søren Kierkegaard criticized in the nineteenth century as the “rotation of crops that depends upon the boundless infinity of change, its extensive dimension.”226 Condemning the change in surface as a superficial and ultimately pointless response to boredom, Kierkegaard proposed “the principle of limitation” as a substantial and more resourceful way to address the ennui of everyday life.

Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities from 1961 looks at dullness as a disease that infects city life. The lack of diversity, Jacobs argues, in the new neighborhoods built all at once eventually leads to stagnation and immobility.227 “The practical penalties of dullness, from this and other causes, stamp the neighborhood early. It becomes a place to leave.”228 Mixed used urban neighborhoods, where “bars, theaters, clinics, businesses and manufacturing” are intermingled within residential areas would prevent the proliferation of “dull, inherently dangerously gray areas” that similar structures would produce in the suburbs.229 In

224 Ibid., 82. 225 Ibid., 94-95. 226 Kierkegaard, Either / Or, 291. 227 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 198. 228Ibid., 198. 229 Ibid., 231. 52

Jacobs’s narrative, gray, dull, boring are all synonyms to urban blight while she is advocating for urban diversity, both human and programmatic.230

As the principles of modernist architecture were being seriously questioned all over Europe, in the early 1960s British architect Cedric Price along with Joan Littlewood, one of Britain’s most radical theater directors, producers, and social activists, embarked together on the challenging adventure of designing “The Fun Palace.” Never raised as a physical structure, the Fun Palace was conceived with the purpose of bringing together education and leisure. Due to automation and prefabrication, the post-World-War-II British economy was predicted to become leisure-driven.231 In that context, Price and Littlewood attempted to make both education and leisure accessible to the working class232 and to erase the modernist distinction between work and leisure.233 I suggest that one of the underlying stakes of the project was to overcome the boredom of the urban dweller, soon to be faced with too much free time and too little engaging activities.

Developed over the course of several years by an interdisciplinary team that would eventually comprise architects, designers, sociologists, cyberneticians, scientists and politicians, the Fun Palace challenged the conventional understanding of architecture as a fixed, immobile structure. It proposed, instead, an “interactive machine” that could be changed, modified, adapted, and reconfigured by the inhabitants themselves, based on their own desires, needs, and actions.

When Cedric Price started his architectural education in the early 1950s at St. John’s College in Cambridge, he was mostly interested in prefabrication.234 His take on history in general and architectural history in particular was soon to be guided by an understanding of change and transformation (in culture and society) as the driving forces that shape the built

230 Peter Laurence has noticed that Jacobs considered “blight” a strong enough idea in her book to list it in the index. [Peter L. Laurence, “Contradictions and Complexities: Jane Jacobs’s and Robert Venturi’s Complexity Theories,” Journal of Architectural Education 59, No. 3 (February 2006): 49-60]. 231 Stanley Matthews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), 10. 232 Ibid., 68. 233 Ibid., 70-71. 234 “Prefabrication was the only thing that interested me, but we weren’t taught anything about it.” (Matthews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space, 22). 53

environment.235 His conviction that “life was a matter of change and complexity” led to his idea of the ephemeral nature of architecture and his interest in the rising sciences of indeterminacy: cybernetics and game theory.236 Spawned by an accidental encounter with Joan Littlewood shortly before her departure for Nigeria, Price’s collaboration with the theater director and activist began in 1962 and continued for several years as they worked closely together to develop the concept of the Fun Palace.

Making use of Price’s combined interests in prefabrication, change, and indeterminacy, the Fun Palace offered the opportunity to address the rising issue of modern boredom. As Price and Littlewood were also invested in publicly promoting the project to the local government, politicians, and local neighborhood associations, one of their publicity pamphlets suggested a remedy to the problems of daily routines, urban boredom, and alienation:

Have you changed your job?

Did you want to?

Do you enjoy routine?

…

Do you suffer from boredom?

overwork?

loneliness?

overcrowding?

12 or more yesses [sic], read on.237

Described as a complex tool for self-discovery, education, and leisure, the Fun Palace promised to engage people in a variety of activities such as eating, drinking, dancing, skiing, bowling, swimming, but also vintage car restoration, photography, finger painting, mutual

235 Matthews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space, 23. 236 Matthews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space, 40-41. 237 Matthews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space, 92. 54

admiration, and even sex.238 An experiment in programmatically addressing large-scale boredom, the Fun Palace invited people to physically change and adapt its configuration to respond to their own desires. Price seems to offer the answer to boredom in the possibility of perpetual change. Built upon the indeterminacy of change and the idea of an open, never- completed work, the structure was conceived upon the assumption that people need variation and constant stimulation to overcome the dullness of their individual lives. Interpreted as one of the earliest examples of virtual reality,239 and with the hindsight of current discussion on simulation and virtual reality, the Fun Palace prompts larger questions about the relationship of distraction and entertainment to boredom.

First published in 1963, Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander’s Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanism, shared similar concerns with Rudofsky and Jacobs.240 Modern man’s “fundamental monotony of his anxiety-ridden existence” lacks daily variety, the physical transparency of the walls along with the deafening sounds of the new machines and mechanical devices are threatening “the provision for relaxation, concentration, contemplation, introspection.”241 As “more and more becomes less and less,”242 overstimulation leads to boredom, a state that the authors describe as a disease whose pathology they identify in the proliferation of artificial, machine-controlled environments.243 The subchapter titled “The pathology of boredom” concludes with an illustration by Saul Steinberg of a man holding up his

238 Ibid., 88. 239 Ibid., 88. 240 Born in 1900 to a prosperous family in Grozny, Serge Chermayeff was sent to a boarding school in England when he was ten and there he would eventually complete his education (while supporting himself as a ballroom dancer!). For a short period of time, he partnered with Erich Mendelsohn in the 1930s and in 1940 immigrated to the United States. After teaching at the California School of Fine Arts, from 1946 until 1951 was the director of the Institute for Design in Chicago and later taught at Yale, Harvard, and MIT. Born in Vienna in 1936, Christopher Alexander moved to England where he received a Bachelor’s degree in architecture and a Master’s degree in mathematics. He moved to the United States in 1958 and started teaching at the University of California, Berkeley in 1963. 241 Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander, Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanism (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1963), 74-77. 242 Ibid., 78. 243 Ibid., 78-79. 55

oversized fingerprint – perhaps a desperate attempt at preserving individuality and privacy in face of the “uniformity of the air-conditioned nightmare.’”244

Chermayeff and Alexander’s book resides at the intersection of their interests. Chermayeff examined the idea of community as the core of human existence (an interest later developed in his 1971 Shape of Community: Realization of Human Potential, co-authored with Alexander Tzonis). Alexander was searching for mathematical, computer-generated models capable of objectively solving subjective issues (which he expanded in his 1977 A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction). While the first part of Community and Privacy is a critique of the fragmented and alienated nature of modern life, the second part proposes a strategy to identify a specific number of functions necessary for the wellbeing of both the individual and the community and then to combine them in an optimal way to best satisfy those functions. The book received mixed reviews. Critical of authors’ confusion between fact and value, sociologist William H. Key wrote that they “propose a naïve theory of human nature, and completely ignore the role of culture and social structure in human affairs,” but recognized its relevance in highlighting the disconnect between architects, city planners, and sociologists.245 Other authors have recognized the seeds of Alexander’s “pattern language that he will fully develop years later.246

Dedicated “To Walter Gropius with admiration affection and gratitude,” the book shows the authors’ commitment to modernism while at the same time voicing a common discontent of the era with architecture turning into a stale international style. Venturi was familiar with the work of Christopher Alexander from whose book Notes on the Synthesis of Form he quotes in Complexity and Contradiction to support his own argument for a an architecture of complexity.247 Proposing a rational, positivist, and problem-solving approach to design, Alexander makes the claim that “the ultimate object of design is form.”248 His argument “is

244 Ibid., 79. 245 William H. Key, Book review, The Sociological Quarterly 7, No. 1 (Winter, 1966): 106. 246 Brian Goodey, “Cut Down to Size? Christopher’s Alexander’s ‘A City Is Not a Tree’,” Built Environment, Vol. 8, No.4, Classics Revisited (1982): 259-260. 247 “But now our position is different: ‘At the same time that the problems increase in quantity, complexity, and difficulty they also change faster than before’ … .” [Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 16 – from Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1964), 4]. 248 Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass. 1964; 7th printing, 1973), 15. 56

based on the idea that every design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness between two entities: the form in question and its context. The form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem.”249

Amos Rapoport and Robert E. Kantor’s already discussed 1967 article built upon New Criticism and cognitive psychology (Gestalt and behaviorism) to argue for an urban environment designed on the principles of ambiguity and complexity.250 They identified the problem of contemporary architecture in that “it has been simplified and cleaned up to such an extent that all it has to say is revealed at a glance. A range of meanings and possibilities has been eliminated.”251 Underlying the argument is the notion of boredom. Their observation that “we may visualize a range of perceptual input from sensory deprivation (monotony) to sensory satiation (chaos)”252 echoed Venturi’s claim from Complexity and Contradiction that that “it seems our fate now to be faced with either the endless inconsistencies of roadtown, which is chaos, or the infinite consistency of Levittown … which is boredom.”253 (Venturi is referenced not only through the paraphrase of the article’s title, but also through an explicit quote from Complexity and Contradiction.254) A key concept of their argument is the “optimal perceptual rate,” i.e. the right balance between simple and complex stimuli. Experimental studies in cognitive psychology have shown that, on the one hand, “stimuli which are too simple lead to boredom; those which are too complex lead to confusion and avoidance,” in other words the optimal perceptual rate depends on the individual .255 On the other hand, they observed that an “average” value of this “optimal perceptual rate” applies to most people.256 Another observation central to their argument brings forth the prominence of vision in the perception of the environment:

249 Ibid., 15. 250 Amos Rapoport and Robert E. Kantor, “Complexity and Ambiguity in Environmental Design,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 33, No. 4 (1967): 210-221. 251 Ibid., 211. 252 Ibid., 211. 253 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 54. 254 Rapoport and Kantor, “Complexity and Ambiguity in Environmental Design,” 216, 217. 255 Ibid., 214. 256 Ibid., 214-215. 57

Investigators have emphasized the visual sense in these studies, and indeed, in most of the research on perceptual preference. … with few exceptions, the visual sense dominates completely. The conflict between visual and tactile evidence as to the object size was resolved in almost every case completely in favor of the visual. These results have suggested that we concentrate wholly on the visual aspects of perception. Indeed, we must do so, for we have not been able to find any studies, which include the other senses.257

It is remarkable how at this point the problem of boredom in architecture focuses exclusively on visual aspects and entirely overlooks any other senses that might have a role in the process. Boredom as profound disengagement with the immediate reality is addressed through the same disembodied visual stimuli that have generated the tedium in the first place and which only keep reinforcing it even further.

In France, the mid-century witnessed growing unrest, increasingly leftist orientations, and a deep sense of alienation that all culminated with the political upheaval of 1968. The French left began to realize the necessity for changes without which a world where one died of starvation would be replaced by one where one died of boredom.258 The situationists were long concerned with the issue of boredom in architecture.259 Present on the political, social, and cultural scene, Henri Lefebvre continued his investigation of the everyday with a study of the city of Mourenx, a town of 12,000 inhabitants built in 1958.260 There he noticed that the “new working class is engaged in a struggle of immense importance against the wound of the modern world: boredom, the monotony of the processes of work, the order of the functional, bureaucratic city.”261 In that context, a group of like-minded individuals founded the group Utopie that comprised sociologists, urban planners, architects, and a landscape architect.262 As a form of resistance to Beaux-Arts architectural practices, but also to the stifling norms of the society, the group studied

257 Ibid., 214. 258 Jean-louis Violeau, “Utopie: In Acts,” in The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in ’68, ed. Marc Dessauce (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 39. 259 Ibid., 39. 260 Ibid., 39. 261 Henri Lefebvre quoted in Violeau, “Utopie: In Acts,” 39. 262 Violeau, “Utopie: In Acts,” 37. 58

inflatable structures from houses to public buildings. (The British group Archigram was experimenting in similar directions.) Manifesting a strong discontent with the current urban practices, the inflatable “represented … a festive symbol of the new energy. It did so through its fragility, its will to express the ideas of lightness, mobility, and obsolescence, through a joyous critique of gravity, of boredom with the world, and of the contemporary form of urbanism that had been realized.”263

The pervasive issue of boredom found its way into the discourse of American magazines reflecting the concerns of leading practitioners. In the 1960s, Progressive Architecture (P/A), one of the leading architectural publications, was discussing issues such as the value of novelty, meaning, and communication in architecture, the boring and the interesting, architecture as problem-solving. Starting in 1954 the journal granted annual awards in different architecture and urban planning categories and published them in the January issue of the following year, along with selections from the jurors’ comments. These notes and transcripts reveal the underlying themes of the era and show that Venturi’s ideas and propositions from Complexity and Contradiction were neither unique, not unheard of, but were crystalizing, in fact, many of the concerns of the time.

Before Venturi launched his campaign against novelty in architecture, the jurors of the 1959 competition remarked that “Perhaps we can shock the profession into a realization that when a thing rests only on the value of novelty it ceases to be novel in a few years.”264 They saw the excitement of a building coming from the relationship of interior spaces265 and advocated for a “thoughtful variety,”266 a term dear to Venturi and repeated often in Complexity and Contradiction.267 The following year brought what jurors called “a shift in design interest:”268 while most awards and citations were received in residential and commercial architecture, there were no significant projects in education, religion, industry, or urban design. The jurors wondered: “What has caused this shift in design interest? ” … “Is it simply a bored reaction? Is it

263 Violeau, “Utopie: In Acts,” 71. 264 Progressive Architecture (January 1960): 99. 265 Ibid., 99. 266 Ibid., 100. 267 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 44, 48, 62. 268 Progressive Architecture (January 1961): 97. 59

school boards inhibiting the architect?”269 Defending his own interest in history and visual forms, Philip Johnson noticed a particular direction of the projects, “which is the most unpopular one today – the historical tendency.”270

In January 1962, Charles Moore’s project for his own house, which received a citation in the residential category, reclaimed several “10-ft-high Tuscan columns of solid fir complete with entasis” from a demolition site in San Francisco and used eight of them to define a pyramidal domed skylight and another smaller square.271 (Figure 1.25.) This use of architectural spolia indicates an appreciation for the past as the modern clean slate becomes increasingly dissatisfying. The jurors also noticed a recurrence of pyramid-shaped roofs – perhaps also a sign of a renewed interest in history – which they deemed “largely a stylistic preoccupation, which, one imagines, will be over shortly as soon as someone comes along with the next entertainment.”272

In 1965, a school for girls designed by Charles Colbert received a citation in the education category for a delightful space in which “one would never be bored.”273 (Figure 1.26.) A member of that year’s jury, Serge Chermayeff noticed the emergence of a new, non- architectural category. Commenting on one of the winning projects, an aquarium that he described as “partly an exhibition, partly a new type of civic space,” Chermayeff remarked – in many ways foreseeing Venturi’s future position – that this “disembodied architecture” involved “several specialized communication techniques – typography, graphics, lighting.”274 As if confirming Chermayeff’s insight into new forms of architectural representation, the cover of the February issue of Progressive Architecture borrowed from cartoon vocabulary and showed two young children, a boy and a girl, staring at a remote industrial- looking architecture. Pointing to the building, the boy tells the girl, in a Lichtenstein-ian manner: “Look Jane. Look and see. See the environment for learning. See, see, see.”275

269 Ibid., 97. 270 Ibid., 97. 271 Progressive Architecture (January 1962): 146. 272 Progressive Architecture (January 1962): 171. 273 Progressive Architecture (January 1965): 138. 274 Ibid., 170. 275 Progressive Architecture (February 1965): cover. 60

One of the jurors of the 1966 awards harshly critiqued what he began to see as a new residential typology: “These houses are popular because they’re like pop art. That’s why they’re replacing the box: The box had no irony to it at all. The flat boxes are really a kind of seriously considered architectural statement. This isn’t. This is pure pastiche. It’s absurd.”276 The same project (a beach cottage designed by Hobbart D. Betts) was described by another juror as “the simplest, clearest, and most controlled use of an idiom that now seems to be everywhere. In terms of space, however, it’s just a box that happens to shed a couple of roofs for not much reason.”277 By 1966, Venturi’s ideas about architecture as “decorated shed” seem to be present in the architectural discourse.

1966 was Venturi’s year. In addition to the publication of Complexity and Contradiction, the firm of Venturi and Rauch received numerous accolades in the P / A awards competition, published in the 1967 January issue of the journal. The Frug House (Figure 1.27), a summer residence for Mr. and Mrs. Bradford Mills, was granted an award, while the project for the three buildings for a town in Ohio (Figure 1.28) and the Princeton Memorial Park (Figure 1.29.) received citations. The Firehouse 4 in Columbus, Indiana, the forth project submitted by the firm, received particular attention and, although it did not win anything, a photograph of the model was published.278 For the first time in the history of the competition, the jurors decided to grant the awards based not on the previously accepted design categories (e.g. residential, education, health, recreation, urban design, etc.), but rather on various “design problems” identified in the six hundred and fifty-two submissions:

The design problems that the 19 winners successfully broached range through most aspects of architecture today: the design of open spaces, buildings as connective topography, the allusive quality of design, city planning for agencies vs. the developer client, handling super-scale, solving social problems, and designing for the good life.279

276 Progressive Architecture (January 1966): 158. 277 Ibid., 158. 278 The five members of the jury were Joseph Passonneau (Dean of the School of Architecture, Washington University, St. Louis – elected Jury Chairman), David Crane (Chairman, Civic Design program, Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania and practicing architect), Edward D. Dart (partner in Loebl, Schlossman, Bennett & Dart, Chicago), Charles Moore (Chairman of the Department of Architecture, Yale University and practicing architect), and Sepp Firnkas (structural engineer and Associate Professor of Civil Engineering, Northwestern University). 279 Progressive Architecture (January 1967): 109. 61

One section occupying an entire page (and illustrated with Venturi and Rauch’s Firehouse 4) has the title “An Architecture of Allusion” and revolves around the four projects the firm has entered in the competition.280 Perhaps conversing more about Complexity and Contradiction than about the projects themselves, the jurors had different opinions about Venturi’s position. The discussions around topics such as an “architecture of exclusion,” T.S. Eliot, pop life, Pop Art and Pop architecture indicate, on the one hand, that ideas from and even terminology of, the book were already circulating, and, on the other hand, that they were fairly controversial. The opinions ranged from harsh criticism to full support. One juror didn’t see anything particularly innovative in Venturi’s work (“McKim, Mead & White did the same thing, so this is nothing new. They reflected the art and the fashion of their time.”281) Another believed it was very valuable but remained a private architecture in the sense that the ideas would not be embraced by everyone.282 A juror completely dismissed the Memorial Park project for lack of meaning, pointless use of large lettering, and resemblance to contemporary art that has become undignified, “a big joke” evoking a giggle.283 The same juror, however, applauded the Firehouse 4 precisely for avoiding “the arbitrary zips and zaps, little curves and doodads.”284 At the other extreme, a juror enthusiastically welcomed the new direction expressed in the work of Venturi and Rauch for leaving behind the “architecture of exclusion” (a terminology clearly borrowed from Complexity and Contradiction) and introducing allusions both to an “intellectual heritage” and to pop life.285

While the publication of Complexity and Contradiction certainly brought Venturi to the center of the discussions on the future of architecture, the ideas expressed in the book were already present, although perhaps not fully crystallized, in the debates of the time. In many ways, the book provided the opportunity to open up the conversation about “the elephant in the room.” These exchanges on the margins of the P/A awards reflect the tensions already present among architects, the various forms of discontent with both Modernism and Pop Art, the role and

280 Ibid., 114. 281 Ibid., 114. 282 Ibid., 114. 283 Ibid., 114. 284 Ibid., 114. 285 Ibid., 114. 62

mission of architecture, the value of its past, the relevance of its present, and, more importantly, the direction of its future.

Sigfrid Giedion summarized the state-of-affairs in architecture during the mid-decades of the twentieth century in his introduction to the 1967 edition of Space, Time, and Architecture, subtitled “Hopes and Fears.” He succinctly described the situation as “Confusion and Boredom:”

In the sixties a certain confusion exists in contemporary architecture, as in painting; a kind of pause, even a kind of exhaustion. Everyone is aware of it. Fatigue is normally accompanied by uncertainty, what to do and where to go. Fatigue is the mother of indecision, opening the door to escapism, to superficialities of all kinds. … A kind of playboy-architecture became en vogue: an architecture treated as playboys treat life, jumping from one sensation to another and quickly bored with everything.286

The premise of Giedion’s position was a 1961 symposium at The Metropolitan Museum of New York that discussed the theme of Modern architecture in terms of death or metamorphosis. He criticized the approach to architecture in terms of fashion or style, foreseeing neither death, nor metamorphosis in its future, but rather the formation of a new tradition.287 His suggestion for the basis of this new tradition – a brief comment perhaps surprising and largely overlook – is the implicit notion of habitus: “Contemporary architecture worthy of the name sees its main task as the interpretation of a way of life for our period.”288 In other words, he recognizes in the appropriation of and engagement with, habitus the answer to the exhaustion and boredom of contemporary architecture. Confidently, he predicted that “the playboy attitude of the sixties will vanish too.”289 That his optimism was largely contradicted by history and architecture continued to follow trends and fashion, is yet another topic of conversation.

286 Sigfrid Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), xxxii. 287 Ibid., xxxii-xxxiii. 288 Ibid., xxxiii. 289 Ibid., xxxiii. 63

1.3. Less is a bore.

Venturi’s quip Less is a bore is often repeated but rarely considered anything else than a rhetorical pun on Mies’s Less is more. However, references to boredom and the boring are hardly scarce in Venturi’s first book and later in the works co-authored with his wife.

The title of Venturi’s treatise has – during its drafting – oscillated between Complexity and Contradiction and Complexity and Adaptation.290 While the final version has eleven chapters, the last covers the design work of the firm, the table of contents of a draft from 1965 shows the book to have a Vitruvian structure: ten numbered chapters preceded by a “Preface” and followed by “Works.”291 (That Venturi’s book was a nod to Vitruvius’s treatise is also suggested by a direct reference in the first chapter: “But architecture is necessarily complex and contradictory in its very inclusion of the traditional Vitruvian elements of commodity, firmness, and delight.”292)

Revisions to the manuscript to the published book show a deliberate expansion of the topic of boredom. Two projects were replaced from the first lineup and two more were added. As we will see later, the two additional projects included in the final version (Three Buildings for a Town in Ohio and the Copley Square Competition) discuss at length the issue of boredom and the boring.293

A few differences between early and final versions of the chapter titles indicate particular nuances the author intended to convey. The title of the first chapter, for instance – “Nonstraightforward Architecture: A Gentle Manifesto” – went through several changes:

290 Venturi and Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. 225.RV.164 – folder: Complexity and Contradiction “Clean Copy” (2/1965) 291 Venturi and Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. 225. RV.157, 164. 292 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st edition (New York: MoMA, 1966), 22; also present in the preliminary versions of the manuscript. 293 A project lineup from a 1965 draft comprised: 1. Grand’s Restaurant; 2. Headquarters Building, North Penn Visiting Nurse Association; 3. A Project for a Beach House; 4. Meiss House Projects; 5. Foulkways at Gwynedd, Rural Housing for the Aged; 6. Guild House, Friends Housing for the Elderly; 7. Residence in Chestnut Hill; 8. F.D.R. Memorial Competition; 9. Fountain Competition, Philadelphia Fairmount Park Commission; 10. The University Arts Center Competition, University of California, Berkeley, 1965. Two projects (5 and 10) were replaced and two more were added, so that the lineup published in 1966 consisted of: 1. Project, Pearson House; 2. Renovations of the James B. Duke House; 3. 3. A Project for a Beach House; 4. Headquarters Building, North Penn Visiting Nurse Association; 5. F.D.R. Memorial Competition; 6. Grand’s Restaurant; 7. Meiss House Projects; 8. Guild House, Friends Housing for the Elderly; 9. Residence in Chestnut Hill; 10. Fountain Competition, Fairmount Park Association; 11. Three Buildings for a Town in Ohio; 12. Copley Square Competition. 64

“Nonstraightforward Architecture: A Manifesto”294 and “Nonstraightforward Architecture: A Straightforward Manifesto.”295 It is in this manifesto that the first references to boredom appear.

The publication of Complexity and Contradiction in 1966 was preceded by a lengthy article published in Perspecta, in 1965, and titled “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: Selections from a Forthcoming Book.”296 The article was structured in three sections (“A Gentle Manifesto,” “Complexity versus Picturesqueness,” “The Inside and the Outside”) and presented at the very end two of Venturi’s projects as illustrations of his ideas (Headquarters Building, North Penn Visiting Nurse Association and the House for Mrs. Robert Venturi, later known as the Vanna Venturi House). The “Gentle Manifesto” published in Perspecta reads:

I am not intimidated by the puritanical, moral language of modern architecture. I like forms that are impure rather than “pure,” compromising rather than “clean,” distorted rather than “straightforward,” ambiguous rather than “articulated,” allusive rather than simple, perverse rather than impersonal, accommodating rather than excluding.297

This particular fragment has gone through different revisions. In a working draft of Complexity and Contradiction the same passage reads:

Architects can no longer afford to be intimidated by the puritanically moral language of orthodox Modern architecture. I like elements which are hybrid rather than “pure,” compromising rather than “clean,” distorted rather than “straightforward,” ambiguous rather than “articulated,” perverse rather than impersonal, accommodating rather than excluding, redundant rather than simple, vestigial as well as innovating, inconsistent and equivocal rather than direct and clear. I include the non-sequitur and proclaim the duality.298

294 Venturi and Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. 225.RV.164. 295 Venturi and Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. 225.RV.157. 296 Robert Venturi, “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: Selections from a Forthcoming Book,” Perspecta 9/10, (1965), 18. pp. 17-56. 297 Robert Venturi, “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: Selections from a Forthcoming Book,” in Perspecta, Vol. 9/10, (1965): 18. 298 Venturi and Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. 225.RV.157. 65

To this sequence, right after “impersonal,” Venturi added – in a hand-written note at the bottom of the page – “boring as well as ‘interesting,’ conventional rather than ‘designed.’”299 (Figure 1.30.) Thus the final version published in 1966 will read:

Architects can no longer afford to be intimidated by the puritanically moral language of orthodox Modern architecture. I like elements which are hybrid rather than “pure,” compromising rather than “clean,” distorted rather than “straightforward,” ambiguous rather than “articulated,” perverse as well as impersonal, boring as well as “interesting,” conventional rather than “designed,” accommodating rather than excluding, redundant rather than simple, vestigial as well as innovating, inconsistent and equivocal rather than direct and clear. I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. I include the non sequitur and proclaim the duality.300

The “gentle manifesto” concludes with a twist of Mies’s Less is more. Venturi writes: More is no less.301 The following chapter – “Complexity and Contradiction vs. Simplification and Picturesqueness” – is essentially a critique of Mies’s claim.

I propose that while Venturi’s concern with boredom has been a constant theme from his early work through later projects designed with Scott Brown, as well as authored and co- authored texts, the understanding of and approach to boredom has changed. Complexity and Contradiction tackles this issue with an openness that will be lost in subsequent writings and projects where the boring turns into and remains a purely formal attribute, usually described as the antithesis of the interesting. More than a rhetorical pun on Mies’s Less is a bore I suggest that Complexity and Contradiction brings forth perspectives on boredom with larger implications for design and society.

Boredom as public concern. I propose that, building upon ideas from August Heckscher’s The Public Happiness, Venturi’s early interest in boredom addresses primarily issues related to the

299 Ibid. 300 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st edition, 22. 301 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st edition, 23. 66

city and public life. An overview of the projects in Complexity and Contradiction that bring up the question of boredom shows they are all civic interventions.

Boredom as lack of complexity. Drawing from architectural precedents, but also from other sources, immediately following the claim that More is no less, Venturi elaborates on complexity, simplification, simplicity, and blandness. The implicit claim is that boredom ensues from lack of perceptual complexity.

Boredom as relational condition. In response to his own understanding of habit as routine, convention, and norm, Venturi proposes to explore neither the object, nor the subject or their context, but rather the relationship between them. Underlying this position is the idea that boredom resides in a field of relationships.

Boredom as public concern. “Complexity and Contradiction vs. Simplification and Picturesqueness,” the second chapter of Complexity and Contradiction, begins with a critique of modern architects who have ignored ambiguity and “the diverse and the sophisticated” while idealizing “primary forms,” like Le Corbusier, or “visions of simplicity,” like Frank Lloyd Wright.302 In contrast, Venturi quotes from Christopher Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form and August Heckscher’s The Public Happiness to support his view for the need to embrace complexity in architecture.303

302 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st edition, 23-24. 303 “At the same time that the problems increase in quantity, complexity, and difficulty they also change faster than before” (Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 4.); “The movement from a view of life as essentially simple and orderly to a view of life as complex and ironic is what every individual passes through in becoming mature. But certain epochs encourage this development; in them the paradoxical or dramatic outlook colors the whole intellectual scene. … Amid simplicity and order rationalism is born, but rationalism proves inadequate in any period of upheaval. Then equilibrium must be created out of opposites. Such inner peace as men gain must represent a tension among contradictions and uncertainties. … A feeling for paradox allows seemingly dissimilar things to exist side by side, their very incongruity suggesting a kind of truth.” [August Heckscher, The Public Happiness. (New York: Atheneum, 1962), 102]. Both sources cited in Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture 1st edition), 24. 67

Alexander’s book offers a positivist approach to design as problem-solving. It exposes a rational and logical path to solve the problem of contemporary complexity of systems and structures.304

Heckscher’s book was of a different nature and addressed the issue of boredom from its very outset. Heckscher was a liberal writer and political activist who at different times has served as the chairman of the New School for Social Research, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Parsons School of Design.305 He had been a Parks Commissioner under New York’s Mayor John V. Lindsay, the chief editorial writer at the New York Herald Tribune (1952-1956), coordinator of cultural affairs at the White House in 1962 under John F. Kennedy, and served as a special consultant on the arts in the Kennedy Administration. Committed to and deeply engaged with civic matters, Heckscher acknowledged the great influence that Hanna Arendt’s The Human Condition exercised on his own Public Happiness.306 In a world increasingly concerned with the happiness of the individual, Heckscher felt that larger issues such as the happiness of the state and the very idea of citizen were being neglected.307 His perspective on politics is founded on the notion of polis, “not the politics of management and elections, but politics in the old, classical sense of man in relation to his fellows and the community in relation to a good and meaningful existence.”308

Heckscher begins his introduction to The Public Happiness with a personal story:

In Copenhagen, an autumn ago, we were discussing some of the political and economic questions which habitually recur at international conferences. A young Dane got up in the back of the room. “It is very well to worry about satisfying the material needs of the people,” he said in effect. “But these are not the real problems of our society. These real problems are deeper – boredom, loneliness, alienation. Unless the politics of our time can give relevant answers in this sphere, they will not engage the central interest of the

304 Eventually, Alexander will formalize his studies in A Pattern Language, a book informed by mathematics and cybernetics and intended as a manual that offered a design method for any design problem of any scale. 305 Eric Pace, “August Heckscher, 83, Dies; Advocate for Parks and Arts” in The New York Times, April 7, 1997. 306 Heckscher, The Public Happiness, 45. 307 Ibid., v. 308 Ibid., vi. 68

citizen. They will cease being exciting, or even amusing, and become more and more the preoccupation of a small professional group.”309

Thus Heckscher situates collective boredom at the core of civic responsibilities of the time and discusses this topic at length throughout the book, including in a chapter specifically addressing architectural and urban issues.310 Understanding the modern condition as increasingly abstract and remote from things, he proposes an approach to the objective world through “an attitude essentially playful, ironical and detached.”311 He believes that while the Puritanism and rationalism quintessential to the American character have muted the ironical voice, there is still hope for play in the contemporary world. Like Joseph Pieper, Heckscher reclaims the higher notion of leisure – lost in the modern world – through the notion of play: “Leisure, if it is not to consist of mass orgies and mass boredom, must cultivate an attitude of play.”312 Play, as showed earlier in this chapter, was the key concept of Venturi’s design for the Copley Square Competition, a project that, we will see later, also places boredom at its generative core.

Many of Heckscher’s ideas revolve around the topic of boredom. In the age of communication, assaulted by images and sounds, humanity suffers from a profound and debilitating boredom that emerges in response to a hostile world: “It is not the boredom of the haphazard or even involuntary kind; rather it is a deliberate boredom, a carefully contrived blank, a sublime disregard that might be thought worthy of the sage or seer. There is nothing that completely abolishes the world as boredom of this kind.”313 What this boredom entails is not a contemplative state, but on the contrary, “a gray thought in a gray and milky shade,” the desire for more entertainment, and a “search for new sensations.”314 A few decades earlier, Benjamin and Kracauer have uncovered the unexpected delight hidden under the deadening appearance of tedium. Benjamin described it as “a warm gray fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful of silks.”315 Kracaeur argued that if one is patient enough in his boredom, he will experience “a kind of bliss that is almost unearthly.”316 Boredom as a contemplative state is hard

309 Ibid., v. 310 The chapter “The Organization of Space,” 253-274. 311 Heckscher, The Public Happiness, viii. 312 Heckscher, The Public Happiness, viii. 313 Ibid., 79. 314 Ibid., 79. 315 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, D2a, 1. 316 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 334. 69

to reach for the modern man because, Heckscher observes, “the bored man is not satisfied with his own boredom.”317

The built environment also contributes to the alienation of the modern individual. The fear of overcrowding on the one hand, and that of emptiness on the other, spawn a generalized discontent: “Thinking of the United States today, one sees in the mind’s eye this bareness and this crowdedness alternating uneasily, producing a psychological state where boredom succeeds to nervous agitation.”318

In Complexity and Contradiction, Venturi quotes from the chapter “The Approach to Reality” in which Heckscher examines people’s attitude toward modern life. Again, boredom is central to Heckscher’s analysis. He distinguishes between different groups of people. One category embraces the vagueness of their time and people “are not really bored” because they are in constant motion, following the trends and fads of their time.319 Another category includes those who make the best of the moment. Lastly, there are “the true citizens of their time” who have liberated themselves from the constraints of consumerism, without renouncing the pleasures of life and thus are able to find the deeper meaning and value of their existence. They are “not bored because even deceptions can be interesting to the enlightened, and not despairing because the only despair can be within themselves.”320 People in this latter category have succeeded in turning alienation into detachment and the flimsiness of things into a new set of values.321 What they all have in common, Heckscher believes, is a view of life as essentially complex, an attitude that embraces irony and playfulness, and a “feeling for paradox.”322 Reaching this particular state of higher understanding shows the level of maturity of an individual, but also of an epoch, as proved, he suggests, in the evolution of Shakespeare’s work during the Elizabethan time toward appreciating the variety and absurdity of worldly things, along with the belief in the transformative power of the spirit.323 Not only are all these ideas are present in Venturi’s first book, but he conducted studios at University of Pennsylvania focused on the design of a

317 Heckscher, The Public Happiness, 9. 318 Ibid., 254. 319 Ibid., 101. 320 Ibid., 101. 321 Ibid., 102. 322 Heckscher, The Public Happiness, 102. 323 Ibid., 102. 70

Shakespearian theater.324 (His interest in Shakespeare was also nurtured by T.S. Eliot’s writings.325)

While having a clear bias for the world of Classical Greece, Heckscher is far from dismissing contemporary art and architecture. He believes in achieving a relationship between high art and popular art and is open to unconventional artistic visions that embrace and re- imagine trite everyday objects such as commercial signs and lights, which “carry within themselves the elements of a fresh creativeness.”326 Seeing Times Square as a form of jazz and reading the “emphasis on drama, symbol and allusion” as the elements of a “new Baroque” manifested in modern architecture, Heckscher notices the contemporary desire and need to overcome the “colder forms of functionalism.”327

In 1965, Venturi and Rauch made a proposal for the downtown of North Canton, a small town in Ohio, hometown to the Hoover Company, one of the largest manufacturers of vacuum cleaners in the world. The intervention included a town hall, a Y.M.C.A. building, and an extension of the public library (Figure 1.31). Venturi compared the design of the town hall with that of a Roman temple, where the giant columns and the pediment of the porch were replace by a free-standing screen – “partially disengaged wall in front with its giant arched opening superimposed on the three-storied wall beyond.”328 The building faces Main Street and ends the longitudinal axis of the central plaza across Main Street. Various study sketches and perspectival drawings show the prominence of this wall that creates a façade toward the plaza and also a secondary circulation channel (Figure 1.32.). The finishing material of the town hall is dark brick, a reference to the Hoover factory, while the screen wall is covered in thin white marble slabs.329

The screen constitutes a common theme to all three building proposals. The library addition is essentially a wall that wraps around the existing building; through the openings

324 Archival evidence shows these studios were taught from 1961 through 1964. Venturi Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. 225.RV.162-3 325 “Eliot called the art of the Elizabethans ‘an impure art,’ in which complexity and ambiguity are exploited: ‘in a play of Shakespeare,’ he said, ‘you get several levels of significance.’ …” (Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st edition, 28) 326 Heckscher, The Public Happiness, 284. 327 Ibid., 284. 328 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st edition, 124. 329 Ibid., 125. 71

punctured in this wall one gets a glimpse of the older building behind. Sitting opposite the Hoover factory, the Y.M.C.A. building receives a false front façade – a free standing wall resembling the one of the town hall (Figure 1.33.). Its design is based on a play between different rhythms. The façade has no beginning, middle or end, “it is just one continuous thing resulting from the constant, even boring rhythm” of the large openings.

The almost constant rhythm of grid-opening is played against the smaller and more irregular rhythms of the two-story building-proper behind. A contrapuntal juxtaposition contrasts the “boredom” of the false façade with the “chaos” of the back façade which reflects the interior circumstantial complexities.330

While boring here seems to describe the uniformity of monotonous formal rhythms, I believe it reflects, in fact, a larger social condition: a certain tedium of the small town, the repetitive rhythms of mass produced goods and factory life taking place in the Hoover facility nearby. Both the free standing wall of the town hall and the one of the Y.M.C.A. building act as screens, but also as stage sets against which everyday life with its habits and routines takes place. A close examination of different sketches shows not only the conventional silhouettes of people in motion, but also less predictable situations: a person in a wheel chair with their caregiver, toy boats floating on the artificial pond in the center of the plaza, and people skating (Figure 1.34.). One of the justifications for the Y.M.C.A. false façade spawns from the way it is inhabited: “The front wall contains a buffer zone between building and plaza for skaters in the winter on the left side, and an outdoor niche with fireplace for them on the right where it becomes a retaining wall, and also a great ramp on axis with the existing church on Main Street.”331 The rhythm of the façade, as well as the rigor of the plans designed with practicality in mind, reveal the dullness of administrative duties, while at the same time permitting everyday life to follow its own course. Boredom overflows its immediate presence as formal device with repetitive elements and opens up larger questions about modern society.

The twelfth and last project shown in Complexity and Contradiction, the entry for the Copley Square Competition co-authored by Venturi and Rauch with Gerod Clark and Arthur Jones, revolves, as shown earlier, around the issue of play (Figure 1.16). The other significant

330 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st edition, 126. 331 Ibid., 126. 72

topic is boredom, which, like in the previous project, goes beyond a formal understanding related to the repetitive nature of the grid. The main compositional tactic of the project is a multi-layered grid that “reflects in miniature the gridiron pattern of the part of Boston surrounding Copley Square.”332 (Figure 1.18.) The Trinity Church acts as an accent in the “three-dimensional repetitive pattern without a climax.”333 The design of this public plaza reflects the everyday rhythms of life and its “thickness.” Multiple grids constitute this three-dimensional pattern: the alleys, the trees, lampposts, and street furniture, the variations in topography. Different “accents” or “slight and violent exceptions”334 – accidents, Josef Frank might have called them – nuance the composition: the big Trinity Church and its miniature replica, inscriptions of nursery rimes, variations in elevation (Figure 1.17.). Venturi writes: “In the context of the ‘boring’ consistent grid inside the square the chaotic buildings to the north become ‘interesting’ and vital elements of the composition.”335

Drawing upon Gestalt psychology, Venturi conceptualizes the proposal in terms of visual perception. The “spatial plaid” is perceived in different ways from a distance (as a plain blur) and from close by (as “intricate, varied and rich in pattern, texture, scale and color.”336) Bringing together matters of Gestalt perception and boredom was an earlier concern of his, as shown in the theory course taught at the University of Pennsylvania. The outline of the eleventh lecture, on “Composition; Proportion, Unity” addresses these topics directly:

Unity as the relationship of parts to form a whole.

Perceptual basis: Gestalt psychology

Necessity of balance of unity with variety; boredom vs. chaos; examples in housing too fragmental or too independent

Varying relationships of the parts and the whole to create unity.337

332 Ibid., 130. 333 Ibid., 130. 334 Ibid., 132. 335 Ibid., 130. 336 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st edition, 132. 337 Venturi Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. 225.RV.187. [0065] 73

Boredom (as the ultimate monotonous order) and chaos (as the ultimate disorder), the two extreme poles, have a double role in the Copley Square project: on the one hand, they refer to the nature of the built environment, and on the other hand, they reflect the nature of the urban life itself. Venturi discusses the American way of life in opposition to the Italian one in terms of appropriating the square: while Europeans spend time outdoors in the city in long passeggiatas, Americans prefer to stay home watching TV.338 Thus he replaces the boring empty open plaza dear to Modern architects, but no longer relevant for contemporary life, with a thick plaid, “boring” only in name.

There are opportunities to see the same thing in different ways, the old thing in new ways. As there is not a single, constant accent – a fountain, reflecting pool nor the great church itself, for instance, neither is there a single static focus when you move within and around the square. There is the opportunity for a variety of focuses, or rather for changing focus. The main paradox of this design is that the boring pattern is interesting.339

The rhetoric of boredom concludes Venturi’s presentation of the Copley Square project. He extends the critique of open spaces in the city to the emptiness of parking lots, the deserts of urban renewal, and the amorphous suburbs.340 Heckscher has decried the alienating transition from bareness to crowdedness in public spaces. Venturi’s response is to address the void – spatial and social – through the density of a “non-piazza” that offers a variety of experiences, perceptions, and relationships. This position will gradually change as he will fully embrace the spatiality of parking lots and of suburban developments. At this point, however, his explorations in addressing the issue of collective boredom, while privileging visual relationships, involve materials, forms, and a concern for people’s habitus and ways of life.

Boredom as lack of complexity. At the end of his “gentle manifesto” Venturi takes a stance against the principles of Modern architecture embodied in Mies van der Rohe’s dictum Less is more. He writes:

338 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st edition, 133. 339 Ibid., 132. 340 Ibid., 133. 74

But an architecture of complexity and contradiction has a special obligation toward the whole: its truth must be in its totality or in its implications of totality. It must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion. More is not less.341

The following chapter expands his critique of Mies’s “magnificent paradox” and argues for an approach to architecture that takes into account the complexities and contradictions of everyday life. Venturi derived his ideas about complexity from different sources.342 Throughout Complexity and Contradiction he referenced mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel, T.S. Eliot and New Criticism, Gestalt psychology, Christopher Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Herbert Simon’s article “The Architecture of Complexity,” August Heckscher’s The Public Happiness. Never quoted directly, perhaps because it was too close to Venturi’s own ideas, Heckscher’s introduction to The Public Happiness advocated for an approach to reality that “involves a recognition of life as essentially complex and contradictory,” perhaps a source of the very title of Venturi’s book.343

Venturi proposes a take on contemporary architecture as a problem-solving endeavor. He quotes Paul Rudolph (whom he will severely criticize later in Learning from Las Vegas) and his critique of Less is more. Rudolph has posited that Mies’s point of view entails a deliberate selection of the problems that need to be solved, while many others remain unaddressed.344 Venturi distinguishes between simplicity and simpleness, where the former arises from inner complexity and is highly desirable, while the latter derives from oversimplifcation and should be avoided. The Doric temple belongs to the first category, Philip Johnson’s Glass House to the second.345 He states: “Where simplification cannot work, simpleness results. Blatant simplification means bland architecture. Less is a bore.” Venturi’s statements about complexity in architecture are constantly opposed to blandness, banality, and simplification. His implicit

341 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st edition, 23. 342 In his article “Contradictions and Complexities: Jane Jacobs’s and Robert Venturi’s Complexity Theories,” Peter Laurence offers the most comprehensive account of Venturi’s understanding of “complexity.” 343 Heckscher, The Public Happiness, viii. 344 “Paul Rudolph has clearly stated the implications of Mies’ point of view: ‘All problems can never be solved. … Indeed it is a characteristic of the twentieth century tat architects are highly selective in determining which problems they want to solve. Mies, for instance, makes wonderful buildings only because he ignores many aspects of a building. If he solved more problems, his buildings would be far less potent.’” [Paul Rudolph quoted in Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st edition, 24 from Perspecta 7, The Yale Architectural Journal (1961): 51]. 345 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st edition, 25. 75

claim is that boredom grows from lack of variety and lack of visual perceptual complexity. He recognizes “the desire for a complex architecture, with its attending contradictions” in Mannerist periods such as sisxteenth century Italy or the Hellenistic age, as well as in the works of Soane, Ledoux, Furness, Sullivan, Le Corbusier, Aalto, and Kahn.346

Venturi proposes two avenues to address the issue of complexity as an implicit remedy to boredom: the medium (appearance) of architecture and the program in architecture.347 The former refers essentially to architecture as form and its visual perception: “Simplified or superficially complex forms will not work. Instead, the variety inherent in the ambiguity of visual perception must once more be acknowledged and exploited.”348 The latter indicates the relationship between architecture and the increasingly intricate demands of everyday life, encompassing everything from the small scale of the house to the large scale of space rockets and city planning. In the following chapter (“Ambiguity”) Venturi elaborates on the notion of medium as a perceptual paradox between what an image is and what it appears, in other words the psychological effect of art.349 Quoting from the New Critics (T.S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, William Empson, Stanley Edgar Hyman) and showing architectural precedents (Bernini, Lutyens, Le Corbusier, etc.) Venturi makes an argument for “the calculated ambiguity of expression” that “promotes richness of meaning over clarity of meaning.”350 Ambiguity as a sign of complexity remains a recurrent idea throughout the book.

Venturi’s ideas about complexity, perception and experience in the built environment were preceded by Kevin Lynch’s 1960 The Image of the City and Jane Jacobs’s 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Venturi brings forth the issue of boredom – architectural, urban, and social – as the underlying theme of Modern architecture. Born with modernity, boredom became one of its widespread maladies from the stimulation overload experienced by the urban blasé, to the scarcity of sensations found in hardscape plazas, from the loudness of leisure time to the repetitiveness of production lines, from the excess of visual stimuli to the emptiness of the International Style. Paradoxically, boredom’s pervasive presence also signals

346 Ibid., 26. 347 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st edition, 26. 348 Ibid., 27. 349 Ibid., 27. 350 Ibid., 29. 76

the very demise of modernity that Venturi intuitively maps in Complexity and Contradiction. Between Less is more and Less is a bore, boredom undermines the modern project from within.

Boredom as relational condition. In response to his understanding of habit as routine, convention, and norm, Venturi proposes to explore neither the object, nor the subject or their context, but rather the relationships between them. Underlying this stance is the idea that boredom resides in a field of relationships, a position explored in the sixth and seventh chapters of the book, “Accommodation and the Limitations of Order: The Conventional Element” and, respectively, “Contradiction Adapted.”

The two chapters examine the relationship of formal order and exceptions, the relationship of program and form, and what it means to break the rules. (The design methods analyzed here will be applied, among others, in the project for the Copley Square competition.) While acknowledging the necessity of a formal ordering system, Venturi emphasizes the importance of exceptions to the order without which the composition remains “imperfect.” In the vein of de Certeau’s distinction between strategies and tactics, he proposes a series of design tactics to undermine the strong rules of modernism: employing conventional elements unconventionally, using irony, and revisiting standardization. Precedents exist in other fields and other time-periods (e.g. use of architectural spolia, Surrealism, Conceptual Art, the machine aesthetic), but Venturi introduces boredom as an underlying concept for this approach. For him boredom, as well as its remedy, are found in the relationships (or lack thereof) between what he had defined earlier in the book as medium (or form) and program (or the complex demands of everyday life).

Venturi raises an important question about the nature of invention, urging architects to work with what they have, rather than exercise their “visionary compulsion to invent new techniques.”351 “The architects selects, as much as he creates,” he says.352 Talking about convention and cliché, the banal and the obsolete, Venturi implicitly addresses the tedium and dullness underlying familiar things that we know too well. Not unlike Kracauer who looked for

351 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st edition, 43. 352 Ibid., 43. 77

the bliss hidden deep down in profound boredom or Benjamin who saw the colorful silk lining the gray fabric of boredom, Venturi seeks the value of what is being neglected, of the “the honky-tonk elements,” present, yet unseen.353 Unlike Kracauer and Benjamin, however, who uncovered the contemplative dimension of boredom, Venturi proposes a positivist approach focused on form and program. From Gestalt psychology he derives the relationship of things with their contexts (“Familiar things seen in an unfamiliar context become perceptually new as well as old.”354) From New Criticism he borrows the concept of irony (“The architect who would accept his role as combiner of significant old clichés – valid banalities … can ironically express in this indirect way a true concern for society’s inverted scale of values.”) From Pop artists he gets ideas about changes in scale and changes in context to construct new meanings (“…old clichés in new settings achieve rich meanings which are ambiguously both old and new, banal and vivid.”355)

Building upon these tactics, as well as a series of architectural examples collected from various time periods, Venturi puts forward four “techniques of accommodation” to revitalize the relationship between medium and program: the “circumstantial distortion,” the “expedient device”, the “eventful exception,” and the “circumstantial exception.”356 An example from the first category is the plan of the Villa Savoye, where some columns in the rectangular bay system are displaced to accommodate spatial needs.357 An “expedient device” is, for instance, the central post of the portal at the Vezelay monastery that blocks the axis to the altar.358 (Venturi will apply this technique in the design of the street façade of the Guild House with its oversized central column.) An “eventful exception” is the not-quite-symmetrical disposition of the windows at Mount Vernon resulting from earlier renovations and which breaks the dominant symmetrical order of the façade.359 Lastly, the “circumstantial exception” appears in the relationship between rectilinear order and the diagonal, such as in Aalto’s apartment building in Bremen, where the

353 Ibid., 42. 354 Ibid., 43. 355 Ibid., 43. 356 Ibid., 45-50. 357 Ibid., 45. 358 Ibid., 46. 359 Ibid., 48. 78

orthogonal geometry of the dwelling unit plays with the general diagonal orientation following the southern light.360

Clear distinctions between these “techniques of accommodation” are often blurred and the various categories are overlapping. Nonetheless, Venturi presents them as design tactics at both architectural and urban scale. His comparison between Piazza San Marco in Venice and Times Square in New York suggests how these “techniques of accommodation” construct a similar vitality of these two public places, despite them being very different in nature. Venturi argues there is room to accommodate the honky-tonk elements as long as they are confined to well-defined spatial boundaries (such as the spaces of Piazza San Marco and Times Square). It is when they “spill out … to the no-man’s land of roadtown” that they turn into “chaos and blight.”361 Venturi summarizes his critique of the contemporary built environment and boredom – the underlying theme – is understood as a field of relationships between architecture, urban design, and everyday life:

It seems our fate now to be faced with either the endless inconsistencies of roadtown, which is chaos, or the infinite consistency of Levittown (or the ubiquitous Levittown-like scene …), which is boredom. In roadtown, we have a false complexity; in Levittown, a false simplicity. One thing is clear – from such false consistency real cities will never grow. Cities, like architecture, are complex and contradictory.362

Conclusions

A particular understanding of habit and habitus as disembodied practice informs Venturi’s visual and theoretical discourse in Complexity and Contradiction. Influenced by elements of cognitive psychology (such as Gestalt) and behaviorism, as well as New Criticism and complexity theories from the first decades of the twentieth century, Venturi addresses architecture as a positivist problem-solving endeavor. Underlying his ideas, boredom, born with

360 Ibid., 50. 361 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st edition, 54. 362 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st edition, 54. 79

modernity, indicates the beginning of modernity’s slow demise, as shown in an overview of ideas about boredom in architecture during the mid-decades of the twentieth century. More than a clever pun, Less is a bore is a product of the habitus of the time that Venturi charts throughout his treatise. I suggest that the illustrations in the book operate at different levels as didactic, disembodied, and discursive images. Venturi’s interest in boredom is addressed in his theoretical arguments, as well as his own design work. I propose that he understands boredom as public concern, lack of complexity, and as a relational condition. I suggest that in this early stage of his work, boredom has a deeper dimension and the potential to become a contemplative state, an opportunity missed, as we will see in the last chapter, once the interesting enters the polemic against the boring. This later approach originates in Venturi’s understanding of habitus as disembodied practice, already manifested in Complexity and Contradiction, which will further develop into disembodied signs and symbols.

80

Chapter 1. Figures.

Figure 1.1. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, “I am a monument,” 1972.

Figure 1.2. Excerpt from Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st ed., 1966, p.22-23.

Figure 1.3. Excerpt from Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st ed., 1966, p.30-31.

81

Figure 1.4. Excerpt from Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st ed., 1966, p.82-83.

Figure 1.5. Excerpt from Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st ed., 1966, p. 28.

Figure 1.6. Excerpt from Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st ed., 1966, p. 37.

Figure 1.7. Excerpt from Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st ed., 1966, p. 40. 82

Figure 1.8. Excerpt from Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1st ed., 1966, p. 41.

Figure 1.9. Venturi and Short, Grand’s restaurant, Philadelphia, 1961-62. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown..

Figure 1.10. Venturi and Short, Grand’s restaurant, Philadelphia, 1961-62. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

83

Figure 1.11. Venturi and Short, Grand’s restaurant, Philadelphia, 1961-62. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 1.12. Venturi and Short, Grand’s restaurant, Philadelphia, 1961-62. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 1.13. Venturi and Short, Grand’s restaurant, Philadelphia, 1961-62. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

84

Figure 1.14. Venturi and Short, Grand’s restaurant, Philadelphia, 1961-62. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 1.15. Venturi and Short, Grand’s restaurant, Philadelphia, 1961-62. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 1.16. Venturi and Rauch, Gerod Clark and Arthur Jones, Copley Square Competition Entry, 1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

85

Figure 1.17. Venturi and Rauch, Gerod Clark and Arthur Jones, Copley Square Competition Entry, 1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 1.18. Venturi and Rauch, Gerod Clark and Arthur Jones, Copley Square Competition Entry, 1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 1.19. Venturi and Rauch, Gerod Clark and Arthur Jones, Copley Square Competition Entry, 1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

86

Figure 1.20. Venturi and Rauch: Vanna Venturi House, 1966; North Penn Visiting Nurse Association, 1960. Public domain.

Figure 1.21. Robert Venturi, Trubek House, 1972. Public domain.

Figure 1.22. Venturi and Scott Brown, BASCO Showroom, 1976. Public domain.

Figure 1.23. Venturi and Scott Brown, BEST Products Catalog Showroom, 1978. Public domain.

87

Figure 1.24. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Shore, Signs of Life exhibition, 1976. Public domain.

Figure 1.25. Charles Moore, House, 1961. Progressive Architecture, January 1962.

Figure 1.26. Charles Colbert, Riverdale Country School for Girls. Progressive Architecture, January 1965.

Figure 1.27. Venturi and Rauch, Frug House, 1966. Progressive Architecture, January 1967.

88

Figure 1.28. Venturi and Rauch, Three buildings for a town in Ohio, 1965. Progressive Architecture, January 1967.

Figure 1.29. Venturi and Rauch, Princeton Memorial Park, 1966. Progressive Architecture, January 1967.

Figure 1.30. Robert Venturi, page from a working draft of the manuscript for Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

89

Figure 1.31. Venturi and Rauch, Three buildings for a town in Ohio, 1965. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 1.32. Venturi and Rauch, Three buildings for a town in Ohio, 1965. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 1.33. Venturi and Rauch, Three buildings for a town in Ohio, 1965. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

90

Figure 1.34. Venturi and Rauch, Three buildings for a town in Ohio, 1965. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

91

First Interlude: Boredom and Dor

Boredom and the Nature of Invention

To that friend who tells me he is bored because he cannot work, I answer that boredom is a higher state, and that we debase it by relating it to the notion of work.

Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

Born in 1914 to a Jewish family in the small city of Râmnicu Sarat, Romania, the artist Saul Steinberg grew up in the capital city, Bucharest, on Palas Street, “a little street completely apart from traffic” that he described as his “homeland.”1 After having studied philosophy for a year at the University of Bucharest, in 1933 he left his native Romania to study architecture in Italy, at the Regio Politecnico in Milan, where he earned his degree. In Italy Steinberg built a reputation as a cartoonist for Bertoldo, a humor newspaper that welcomed young artists and writers. Beginning in 1938, he was subject to Mussolini’s anti-Semitic racial laws and tried to find refuge in another country. By 1941, he was sought by the police as a stateless foreign Jew with no rights to remain in Italy. On April 27, 1941 he turned himself in and was taken to the Italian internment camp of Tortoreto in the province of Teramo. After six weeks’ internment, he managed to obtain the necessary visas to fly to Lisbon and board a ship to New York in transit to the Dominican Republic, for which he had a residency visa. He spent a year in Ciudad Trujillo before securing a US visa.2 In the United States, Steinberg settled in New York City, married fellow Romanian artist Hedda Sterne and never returned to Romania.

1 Saul Steinberg and Aldo Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, trans. John Shepley (New York: Random House, 2002), 42. 2 For a detailed account of Steinberg’s immigration ordeals, see Mario Tedeschini Lalli, “Descent from Paradise: Saul Steinberg’s Italian Years (1933-1941),” in Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC, n.2 October 2011 www.quest-cdecjournal.it/focus.php?id=221 92

Steinberg’s artistic work has borne the influence of his training as an architect. In a brief letter from 1956 praising the architectural character of Steinberg’s art Le Corbusier wrote:

I can’t help but tell you that you are a great artist. I revisit with infinite joy your “Passports.” You have the gifts of grandeur and style that belong to a great character. Your passing through architecture gave you a vision and a quality of construction and simplification that will allow you, the day you decide to start, to make magnificent paintings. And by paintings I think mostly of murals.3

Steinberg arrives at “construction and simplification” by observing, recognizing, and describing people’s habitus, Pierre Bourdieu’s concept that was examined in the first chapter. For Steinberg, embodied habitus is a practice that he relates back to his childhood years and which also shows, I propose, the creative potential underlying the mood of boredom. Boredom can surface from the tedious repetition of simple, domestic acts, and accounts for Steinberg’s understanding of the nature of invention.

Bourdieu constructed the notion of habitus from his ethnographic studies of the Kabylian house. Central to his concept is the body - the physical body of each individual, male or female, that occupies the house, the ritualistic body of the inhabitants, which situates the house in relation to a larger social ordering system, and the collective body of the community. The relationship of the body to the world is a circular one that Bourdieu defines as “the em-bodying of the structures of the world, that is, the appropriating by the world of a body thus enabled to appropriate the world.”4 Opposed to behavioral determinism as a cause-effect explanation for how individual and collective habits and skills are generated in a community, Bourdieu observes that the structures producing practices assign limits to “the habitus’s operations of invention.”5

3 Jean-Louis Cohen, Le Corbusier Le Grand (Paris: Phaidon, 2014), 402-403. 4 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, U.K; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 89. 5 Ibid., 95. 93

Because the habitus is an endless capacity to engender products - thoughts, perceptions, expressions, actions - whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedom it secures is as remote from a creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from a simple mechanical reproduction of the initial conditionings.6

Habitus neither generates novelty, nor does it endlessly repeat, but rather accounts for the nature of invention as the outcome of embodied practices, specific world views, and cultural and historic structures.

In an undated document from his personal archives, Steinberg described what motivated his work. Opposed to finding inspiration in surprising, shocking or unusual facts and events, he stated: “Amazement has no place, anyhow, anywhere – but then – what drives me to work?”7 He concluded in what appears to be a brutally honest but no less dramatic confession: “Money, success, boredom, vendetta.”8 Having lived years of unstable and insecure life, having moved around from place to place and country to country, money represented a complicated topic: on the one hand, it secured financial stability, but on the other hand it also stood for what he described as the eastern fear of materialism that menaced to taint high artistic ideals.9

In this sequence, boredom constitutes the moment of awareness that elicits a fresh look at the work:

Boredom will make me eventually return to work … work that derives from work (and not from an experience). This may not be true, because the acummulated [sic] experience

6 Ibid., 95. 7 Saul Steinberg Papers at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library, UNCAT MSS 126, Box/Vol. 75, folder “Notes about dreams.” 8 Ibid. 9 “Money - the year of poverty scared me - I feel that I wouldn’t be so scared now, but I’m not sure. I would have tried to make money in any other profession. But I don’t want a great fortune. I talk a lot about money, still snobbish and proud about it, childish, poor administrator, petty. I had the luck of the idiot. (eastern idiot fearful of materialism - also in opposition to parents and Jewish reputation.)” (Saul Steinberg Papers at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library, UNCAT MSS 126, Box/Vol. 75, folder “Notes about dreams.”) 94

stored in the mind will eventually come out and boredom is the instrument for this consolation as good a motive reason. In this dept. of boredom goes the sense of duty.10

What Steinberg describes as “accumulated experience” is another way of talking about an embodied habitus that he strives to make present in his work. Particular instances that reveal this habitus are Steinberg’s drawings of his childhood years, a theme he returns to over and over again and which he never seems to exhaust. Boredom plays a key role in continuously re- defining the limits and terms of his pursuits, as he states in a 1967 interview with a German TV station: when

I get slightly bored with my work, I don’t find the excitement, real excitement, now this boredom tells me something, it’s a message, it means that I grow up and that what used to be entertainment once, it’s no more so, and I have … to invent new things, more difficult maybe, more subtle, new anyway that will certainly interest me.11

Steinberg’s approach to entertainment has changed from his erstwhile understanding of it as “movies and newspapers:” now “I find entertainment and amusement only in what I discover by myself, either nature or work.”12 In the same interview, Steinberg describes the nature of invention as a

spiral that goes in three dimensions. … As you go up the circle becomes more and more restricted, smaller but higher. The difference is the difference of altitude, of height. … [w]hen you are entering to the third dimension, the spiral, and especially conical spiral … then you have a certain assemblance [sic] of going though the same territory, but it’s quite different because this is on a higher level.13

10 Ibid. 11 Saul Steinberg Papers at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library, UNCAT MSS 126, Box/Vol. 100. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 95

In this light, the “construction and simplification” that Le Corbusier’s in Steinberg’s work might be interpreted as a process of revisiting the same familiar territories while gradually eliminating the superfluous and the excess, and offering every time a tighter and deeper perspective. Steinberg’s notion of invention, therefore, does not imply novelty, it requires, instead, a disciplined exercise in defining limitations and restrictions, in seeking individual practices that speak about collective histories, and in finding those particulars that reveal the nature of the whole. Boredom signals not so much the need for a superficial change, but rather the necessity of a closer look. Steinberg further elaborating in 1978: “The life of the creative man is led, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.”14 For Steinberg, boredom is a mood, a state of the soul akin to nostalgia and, as we will see later in this chapter, to the Romanian concept of dor, and a form of introspection. The temporal aspect of boredom (present in the German word Langeweile, i.e. “long while”) plays a key role in his slow-paced appropriation of the world.

A way of understanding how Steinberg negotiates the tension between boredom and invention is through Bourdieu’s concept of embodied habitus reflected in Steinberg’s drawings of his childhood street and home.

This interlude looks at a series of three drawings by Steinberg. First, two ink sketches of the layout of Steinberg’s childhood street and home made during his stay in Ciudad Trujillo (today Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic) from 1941 to 1942 (Figure I.1, I.2.). Born from the tedium of being confined to his room while waiting for a resolution of his immigration case to the United States, these drawings bring together the boredom of mind-numbing routines with the seemingly dull details of an ordinary street in an ordinary neighborhood in Bucharest. The second drawing is titled Strada Palas – a watercolor of the interior of his childhood home made in 1942 showing a serious ten-year old Saul in the process of observing a domestic scene (Figure I.3.). Building upon Bachelard’s proposition that children have similar experiences of boredom and daydreaming, I interpret the drawing as a play between real and imagined houses,

14 Robert Hughes, “The World of Steinberg,” Time 4/17/1978 Vol. 111, Issue 16. 96

customs, and habits.15 The third drawing is yet another Strada Palas, this time from 1966 depicting a street parade in Bucharest in the 1920s (Figure I.4.). Elaborating on Steinberg’s remark on the “infinite boredom” of parades and indirectly the temporal aspect of boredom, I interpret this drawing as a commentary on parallel lives of the city: on the one hand, the habitus embodied in the everyday life of ordinary people and on the other hand, the constructed image of the habitus expressed in official processions and their display of power.

Strada Palas (1941-1942)

[Boredom] is the anticipation of that inanimate infinity that accounts for the infinity of human sentiments, often resulting in a conception of a new life.

Joseph Brodsky, In Praise of Boredom

In 1933, at the young age of nineteen, Saul Steinberg left his native Bucharest to study architecture in Milan. Years passed and after settling in New York City he never returned to his homeland because there are places:

…that don’t belong to geography but to time. And the memory of these places of sadness, of suffering, but above all of great emotions, is spoiled by seeing them again. It’s better to leave certain things in peace, just the way they are in memory: with the passage of time they become the mythology of our lives.16

15 “What special depth there is in a child’s daydream! And how happy the child who really possesses his moments of solitude! It is a good thing, it is even salutary, for a child to have periods of boredom, for him to learn to know the dilaectics of exaggerated play and causeless, pure boredom.” (Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 16.) 16 Steinberg and Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 41. 97

One day however, the well-established artist living in New York City asked a friend who was traveling to Bucharest to take photographs of his childhood street – Strada Palas – and later projected the color slides on the wall of his apartment. They showed him “that nothing has changed except for some trees, which have grown taller, and a wall that’s now covered with ivy. I was horrified to see an automobile in the courtyard of my house.”17 Looking at the huge images he suddenly sensed the overwhelming realization and pain that something was gone forever, something that will never be retrieved or accessible again. Observing the street from a distance appeared both as a sacrilege and a legitimate desire: “I felt as though I were peering into a tomb, lifting the sheet from a corpse. I felt angry as well as curious to see, and then angry for having seen – as though I had lost something.”18 What was experienced as a sickness with unknown causes found a temporary remedy, strange as it may seem, in the very same things that had triggered it: “To cure myself of this illness I sent two other friends to take pictures. One of them took the same pictures, but in winter with snow, which was more beautiful because the changes were less obvious.”19 (Figure I.5.)

Steinberg describes an ailment familiar to many. Once installed, this unusual condition surreptitiously takes over one’s soul and never goes away. As one learns to live with it, the pain sometimes grows more intense, while other times stays dormant, but remains present, unmistakably there. Regret and anger, love and pain, nostalgia and wrath – Steinberg experiences the strange symptoms of a disease bearing, in his native Romanian, the name dor.

Dor. Explored mainly in literary studies and philosophy, but overlooked in visual arts, dor as a creative emotion activates the imagination. Missing and longing for a certain being, place, or situation, constructs a tension between what is lost, and often no longer attainable, and what is desired, and equally unreachable, between memories from the past and the anticipation of the future. Dor transforms reality into an imagined reality. Animated by dor, Steinberg returned to his childhood homeland over and over again. While his drawings and sketches record in

17 Ibid. 42. 18 Ibid., 42-43. 19 Steinberg and Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 43. 98

minute detail both in written and drawn form, neighbors, objects, rooms, they are not intended to construct an accurate depiction of a lost reality. Instead, I suggest, they are daydreams that propose stories about habitus and cultivate the rich ambiguity between two seemingly contradictory manifestations of dor: homesickness (dor de acasă) and wanderlust (dor de ducă).

Every language has certain untranslatable words and the Romanian dor is one of them. Similar, but not fully overlapping with the English longing, spleen, melancholy, the German Sehnsucht and the Portuguese saudade, dor describes a malaise turned “toward an object or toward being.”20 Both an emotion present in Romanian folklore, and a philosophical concept, dor confronts finitude with the anxiety of the infinity, pain with pleasure, desire with restraint. Romanian philosophers Lucian Blaga and Constantin Noica, both of whom had affinities with Heidegger’s phenomenology, have proposed dor as a specific Romanian metaphysical concept.

Steinberg’s dor is a complicated mood that can be understood only in the larger historical and political context of Bucharest in the early decades of the twentieth century when anti- Semitism pervaded all levels of society and trickled down into people’s private lives. Steinberg’s relationship with his home country was not an easy one: “I don’t want to go back to Romania,”21 he confessed to his life-long friend, Aldo Buzzi, and he never did. Affected by those early memories, in his official statements Steinberg has denied any emotional connections with Romania, showing disdain and skepticism toward his homeland. His personal archives, however, tell the rest of the story: “Fucking Patria [homeland] who murdered millions, who never accepted me. Unfortunately all my landscapes, smells, sounds, tastes – are there. Houses, courtyards, sky, mountain air, snow,”22 he wrote in his diary on June 15th, 1991, the day he turned 77. Countless collections of old and new postcards from Romania spanning the years between his childhood

20 See Anca Vasiliu, “Dor,” in Barbara Cassin (ed.), Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 227-228. In addition to homesickness and wanderlust, the word makes other expressions such as mi-e dor de… (I miss someone or something), în dorul lelii (to accomplish something reluctantly and without a precise objective). Etymologically derived from the Latin dolus (pain, suffering), it shares the same root with the verbs a dori (to desire, but also to wish something to someone) and a durea (to be in pain, to feel pain, to hurt). 21 Steinberg and Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 41. 22 Saul Steinberg Papers at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library, UNCAT MSS 126, Box/Vol. 75. 99

and communist times that he often re-interpreted in collages and photomontages, inventing new images, situations, and people (Figure I.6.); copies of Bucharest maps on which he marked the location of the house in which he grew up (Figure I.7.); letters in which friends traveling to Bucharest gave him reports from the city of his youth; personal diary entries recording dreams, memories, family, friends; objects such as pieces of embroidery or various trinkets brought or sent to him from Romania, they all reveal a lasting desire to never forget. This tension between love and rejection, nostalgia and anger, recollection and loss come together in his drawings as expressions of dor.

At no. 4. In the late 1930s in Italy, Steinberg built a reputation as an illustrator for Bertoldo, a magazine that welcomed young artists and writers. He also started contributing pieces to American publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Life, and The New Yorker. Waiting for a resolution of his immigration case to the United States, between 1941 and 1942 he lived in Ciudad Trujillo (today Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic).

Journal entries throughout 1941 and 1942 are filled with the sense of desperation and doubt of someone who is afraid of not only losing track of the people he cares about, but is also afraid of losing his own identity. The constant worries of not receiving news from Adina, his former lover, or his family also reveal the fear of being forgotten and left behind. Jale – four letters that he writes at the end of a note regarding Adina23 - is a Romanian word meaning mourning, deep sadness, grief, despair and sometimes a synonym of dor, jale embodies his struggles and sense of intense loss.

Over the excruciating boredom of not having much to do in Ciudad Trujillo hovered the uncertainty of his complicated legal status. For Steinberg, the boredom of daily routines turned into an introspective state, in which he began to recollect and record habits, situations and people from his childhood. His drawings are simultaneously personal stories spawned by the mood of dor, but also descriptions of certain types of habitus shared at a larger scale by the residents of

23 Saul Steinberg Papers, UNCAT MSS 126, Box/Vol. 89. 100

Bucharest at the beginning of the century. His longing and nostalgia emerge when he is suddenly confronted with the absence of habitus, when outside his habitus. Boredom as a creative state weaves together details of his current everyday life – letters, daily routines, cigarettes smoked – with memories from his past life – lovers, friends, family, places. Georges Teyssot has remarked that “[t]he act of habitation consists in grasping routines that help to organize life, and in rethinking and transposing customary modes of action in response to the need to adapt to unfamiliar circumstances.”24 The boredom spawned from the repetitive actions performed out of necessity and constraint engendered for Steinberg the memories of perhaps another form of ‘boredom,’ that of erstwhile familiar practices, habits, and customs from a past life.

A diary entry from Monday, February 9, 1941 records on three columns what seems to be the dull timetable of a regular day: sirena ore 7 – giornale 1 penso a Adina 6 si mangia sirena ore 8 mi alzo sirena 2 meno quarto 7.30 1 cinema

8.30 – 9 – posta 3 biscocho 9.30 2 cinema

12 si mangia 4-5 posta 11-12 a letto25

Written mostly in Italian – his adopted language, fondly appropriated after the long time he had spent in Italy – his diary is filled with entries that record the tedium and uncertainty of every day, along with the recollections of people dear to him. He spent his days eating, drawing, writing and worrying – about himself (as a life-long hypochondriac fearing real and imaginary ailments) and about his beloved ones: Adina, his long-time lover left behind in Italy col marito e

24 Teyssot, A Topology of Everyday Constellations, 8. 25 Siren 7am – newspaper 1 I think of Adina 6 we eat Siren 8am – I wake up siren at a quarter to 2 7:30 1 cinema 8:30 – 9:00 correspondence 3 cracker / cookie 9:30 2 cinema 12 we eat 4-5 correspondence 11-12 going to bed Saul Steinberg Papers, UNCAT MSS 126, Box/Vol. 89. 101

cane (with husband and dog), and his family, still in Bucharest where fascist sympathies and hatred against Jews were becoming stronger and more menacing, threatening the lives of his relatives. Cara poveretta Adina (poor little dear Adina) and povera mama (poor mother) are the two female figures that haunt his memories and his regrets.

Each period of his life seems to be associated with a particular language, as if memories can only be thought and constructed in the language of the original event. While the diary is largely written in Italian, mama (mother) and tăticu (daddy) are always written (and remembered) in Romanian. Homesick and bedridden, he finds pleasure in writing down the Romanian names of the places he had traveled to with his friends Campus and Fronescu from Bucharest; or perhaps the simple act of recording these names of Romanian resorts brings him the joy of remembering an erstwhile carefree life.26

The agonizing boredom makes every insignificant event become a little wonder worth registering: on Monday, October 20th, alle 7 di sera ho buttato un mozzicone di sigaretta ed e caduto in piedi, followed by a tiny sketch of a burning cigarette butt standing upright.27 He remembers his friend Campus giving an onion to a dog and the dog eating it.28 One day, a watch received as a gift from his former girlfriend, Adina, stops working, but then the following day it miraculously starts ticking again.29

Among the drawings made in Ciudad Trujillo, Steinberg sketched his childhood street, courtyard, and house (Figure I.1-I.2.). Most likely never intended to be published, these sketches reveal his dor for a time and place forever lost. Just as it seemed important to record the exact time when his cigarette butt fell on the floor and stood upright, or when the watch from Adina stopped working and then inexplicably repaired itself, so it was important to mark the

26 Poiana, Omul si Caraimanul, Brasov, Tampa, Tusnad, Lacul Sf. Ana, Sighisoara, Sibiu, Ocna, Ramnicu Valcea, Predeal – all of these were (and still are) popular tourist destinations in Romania. (Saul Steinberg Papers, UNCAT MSS 126, Box/Vol. 89.) 27 “At 7 o’clock in the evening I threw a cigarette butt and it fell standing.” (Ciudad Trujillo diary, Saul Steinberg Papers, UNCAT MSS 126, Box/Vol. 89). 28 Ciudad Trujillo journal, Saul Steinberg Papers, UNCAT MSS 126, Box/Vol. 89. 29 Ciudad Trujillo journal, Saul Steinberg Papers, UNCAT MSS 126, Box/Vol. 89. 102

precise moment when he made these drawings: fatto questo a Ciudad Trujillo nel 1941 – 19 agosto,30 he writes on a “site plan” of his street (Figure I.1.). Written not as a casual indication at the bottom of the page, the way similar annotations are usually scribbled, but made visible in the white space on the right side of the drawing, the note resembles a speech balloon or perhaps a thought bubble in the manner of cartoons. The voice, however, suggests otherwise: it has the serious, celebratory tone found in old votive inscriptions used to mark royal edifications. It registers the time of the making of the drawing, but also a cross section through a past turned present. The next page of the diary zooms into a detailed plan of the house, now explaining the time of the drawing: Strada Palas no. 4, (prin Antim) din 1918 (cred) fino al 1930 o 1931.31 The two sketches have the significance of an inaugural act where recollections become material, rather than mental images. It is the materiality of memories that Steinberg constructs through his mood of dor, marking two overlapping tenses: the time of the making of the drawing, and the time of the memory within the drawing.

Returning to the “site plan,” (Figure I.1.) Palas Street was fairly short: eight houses on one side and seven on the other.32 (Based on the names of the residents that Steinberg locates on their houses - Willy Kaufman, Mantuleasca, Fischer, M-me Schor, M-me Riş, etc. - Strada Palas appears to be inhabited almost exclusively by the Jewish community, but it connects two streets named after the two nearby Christian Orthodox monasteries, Antim and Schitu Maicilor. The neighborhood - Cartierul Uranus – Izvor - had mixed demographics and included a Jewish community, but also Orthodox Christians.) For Steinberg, however, the street is much thicker because it is populated with people, events, stories, and characters that construct a depth otherwise invisible. Steinberg looks at them through the lens of his childhood memories, but he is neither the erstwhile child, nor the present adult, or rather he is both of them at the same time. Fully engaged in the drawing, as only a child living in the present moment can be, he is

30 “Made this in Ciudad Trujillo, in 1941 – August 19.” (Ciudad Trujillo diary, Saul Steinberg Papers, UNCAT MSS 126, Box/Vol. 89). 31 “No. 4, Palas Street (from Antim) from 1918 (I think) until 1930 or 1931.” (Ciudad Trujillo diary, Saul Steinberg Papers, UNCAT MSS 126, Box/Vol. 89). 32 The two streets were Antim and Schitu Maicilor. The eponymous monasteries were located in the same neighborhood, on the Arsenal Hill. The entire area was demolished by the communist regime in the 1980s to make room for a new administrative center of the communist party. 103

nevertheless the grown up that looks back with dor at his childhood life. The street might be short, but the memories associated with it are “long”.

The houses are sometimes identified by different characters associated with them: un cane (a dog), il ragazzo paralitico (the paralytic boy), un tâmplar (a carpenter).33 (Figure I.8.) Bouncing between Italian and Romanian, he constructs a form of Esperanto that joins together two realities and two times, of the adult and of his child alter ego.

His family house is the only one identified by a number: 4. Without a name, the house appears to lack identity. This, however, is deceiving, because numbers – and number 4 in particular – have special significance in Steinberg’s universe; they are not quantitative entities, but living creatures with character and feelings. To the friend traveling to Bucharest, he would give specific instructions about what to capture in the photographs: “the courtyard seen through the gate, the house number and plate.”34 Several of his later drawings give life and stories to different numbers. One in particular shows a Steinberg-resembling cat – another recurrent character in his art – looking inside a number 4, which becomes a secret box that allows one to store, then search, but more importantly to remember and imagine.

Four is an interesting number because it is a shape that would arouse the curiosity of a cat. Most numbers are either open or closed. Number 8, for instance, is closed; a cat has no business to look inside. A cat likes to peer into something that is half open – a little bit open – a mystery. Number 3 is obvious; number 1 is nothing; 5 perhaps is more intriguing, but 4 certainly is perfectly designed and engineered for a cat to look inside and find out what is going on. … The abstraction, number 4, became a reality and the cat became an abstraction because it combined itself with this number. It rendered the whole thing plausible and, from a drawing point of view, perfectly workable.35

33 Saul Steinberg Papers, UNCAT MSS 126, Box/Vol. 89. 34 Steinberg and Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 43. 35 Saul Steinberg quoted in Harold Rosenberg, Saul Steinberg, (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 28-29. 104

Art critic and life-long friend Harold Rosenberg wrote that “readers … may become aware that the number 4 is being dealt with as a shape that has been deprived of its function in the numerical system and has “become a reality.” It is a found object of the same order as a tree or a tin can.”36 While the number 4 has indeed blurred the distinctions between abstraction and reality, there is more to it than just a found object. To the viewer, the box appears empty – there is nothing inside. But for the Steinberg-cat the container is a memory theater triggering recollections only accessible to him. Similarly, the house at 4, Strada Palas is an almost- enclosed container, the only one on the street represented as a box, rather than an unfinished rectangle. And that is because the mysteries at no. 4 are waiting to be revealed.

Inhabitation. Steinberg grew up without purpose made toys, but surrounded by containers of different sizes. His father owned a small factory that made cardboard boxes ranging in size from lipstick holders “covered with colored paper and trimmed with gold and silver,” to large boxes for Passover unleavened bread, “stacked up in big piles that took on the appearance of fantastic cardboard buildings.”37 Similar to the mysterious cases that fascinated young Saul, the house at no. 4 becomes an enigmatic box hiding many secrets. Standing right outside the fence and marked in the sketch by a radiating sun, a felinar (street lamp) sheds light onto the puzzle. (Figure I.8.)

Peeking inside the courtyard, we see beyond the fence and the walls become transparent: inside the house, we guess at what could be a butoi (barrel) and a dulap (wardrobe). Then Steinberg invites us to turn the page and zoom in into the courtyard. (Figure I.2.) Beyond the gate at no. 4 we find cişmeaua (the water pump), a necessary utility at the beginning of the century. Typical for house typologies in early twentieth century Bucharest, several shotgun houses share a common courtyard. The house that directly faces the street belongs to “Sander” – whose name written in big capital letters is an indication of his affluence and social status in comparison to his neighbors. The house itself appears bigger and wealthier.

36 Rosenberg, Saul Steinberg, 29. 37 Steinberg and Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 6-7. 105

As we advance toward the back, we pass through grădină (garden) and by a cluster of oţetari (staghorn sumac). In a small nook bordered by a gard lemn (wooden fence) we stumble upon scară, găleţi, gunoi (staircase, buckets, trash). Another curte internă (interior courtyard) leads toward Schitu Maicilor, one of the two streets connected through Strada Palas. This labyrinth of courtyards, fences, open and enclosed spaces would only make sense in plan in the mind of an adult. Children, on the other hand, would remember the qualities of spaces, how big or small they would feel, along with those details closer to the scale of their tiny stature: the wooden planks on the ground, the buckets, the trash, or the stairs.

Past the house of Sander, on the left, in the back of the courtyard and in front of the oţetari, we arrive at a smaller and more modest house, the only one shaded in plan in a sepia wash, the color of old photographs and fading memories: the family house. (Figure I.2.) It is the adult, Italian-speaking Steinberg who explains, in the upper right corner of the drawing, the evolution of the house, which has matured along with the economic growth of the family:

Strada Palas No. 4 (through Antim) from 1918 (I think) until 1930 or 1931. Over the last 3-4 years the street number is changed and becomes 9 – first running water is introduced in the house, then Sander’s apartment is redone, a new level is added above the kitchen, everything is being modernized and we get electricity, we even take the little room next to the kitchen, we redo the interiors, paint the walls with airbrushed drawings, we buy furniture from the Chiţales.38

While these notes are written in Italian, everything related to the family house is in Romanian. As Steinberg inhabits the rooms, he simultaneously inhabits his native language, which, conversely, is the only one that can render its reality. Even the drawing conventions need meticulous explanations in Romanian to complete the picture.

38 Saul Steinberg Papers, UNCAT MSS 126, Box/Vol. 89, author’s translation from the Italian. 106

Unlike the entrance to the Sander residence, clearly marked in plan by a few steps and two columns, nothing indicates where we enter the Steinbergs’ house. In Romanian folklore it is often the window, rather than the door, that carries the significance of thresholds and rites of passage. Popular beliefs mark the window as the place where sick children pass from one side to the other in a specific ritual of name changing associated with curing their illness.39 The house in the drawing is Steinberg’s home, but also an imagined house that we access through any opening. The main entrance most likely is the antreu (a large vestibule), from which we are taken to the bucătărie (kitchen) to the right and casă (main house) to the left.

A fairly modest house for the family of four occupying it, the Steinbergs’ house has little furniture. A găleată (bucket) sits on the kitchen floor and something that resembles a trapdoor toward the pivniţă (basement) – si cadeva dentro (“one would fall inside”), notes Steinberg, in Italian, as his thoughts, along with his steps, suddenly slip and fall into another reality. A bufet (cupboard) and probably a bed and a table occupy the one-window vestibule. What Steinberg designates as the main house is in fact the largest room where we encounter the garderob vechiu (old wardrobe), garderob nou (new wardrobe), canapeaua mică (the small sofa), an etajeră (bookshelf), a large bed and a godin (a cylindrical heat stove). The latter holds a particular significance for him: in the concert of childhood scents, “the metal stove had a special smell when lit for the first time, since the surface had been greased to keep it from rusting.”40 In an undated interview he professed the power of smell to evoke memories:

I find that one reliable instrument is the nose. I go back to the house where I lived as a child, at night, and try to sniff a past. I allow the nasal emotions to tell me the truth. I discover myself as a house. In the bedroom and living room are my best friends and relatives – The Senses. Eyes, nose, tongue, fingers etc., in constant conversation and emotion. I suspect the eye and nose to be older than I am, and to have their own brains. They may be angels. Down in the basement I hear the mumbling of my underworld:

39 People believed that changing the name of the child would confuse the illness, imagined as a character who, being unable to recognize her after the name change, would lose track of the child. 40 Steinberg and Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 5. 107

furnace and plumbing – my invisible relatives. … And up in the attic, I hear the shrieks of the crazy cousins … We learn to live with them.41

Strada Palas (1942)

Boredom is a warm gray fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful of silks. In this fabric we wrap ourselves when we dream.

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

Dor. Still in Ciudad Trujillo, in 1942 Steinberg made an ink, pencil and watercolor drawing - Strada Palas - displayed for the first and only time in an exhibition curated by Betty Parsons at the Wakefield Gallery in New York, in April 1943 (Figure I.3.). This drawing appears to have had a special significance for Steinberg, who decided not to sell it and apparently never exhibited it again.42

The drawing depicts a family domestic scene – mother (Rosa), father (Moritz), and sister (Lica) – sitting at the table, while the young Saul is standing in the foreground, somewhat remote from the others. Art critic Joel Smith has interpreted the vignette as a breakfast scene in which Saul, self-represented as a student in uniform about to leave for school, observes the scene from the outside, both as a child and as the draftsman of the scene.43 I propose, instead, that, despite his apparent position outside the family circle, the young Saul and the mature Saul are fully engaged with this domestic tableau that depicts the end, rather than the beginning of the day. The

41 Saul Steinberg Papers, UNCAT MSS 126, Box/Vol. 32. 42 Joel Smith, Illuminations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 86. 43 Ibid., 86. 108

drawing can be understood only in the larger context of other drawings made over the span of several decades in which Steinberg has revisited his childhood home and street - among them the sketches made during the two years he spent in Ciudad Trujillo and the Strada Palas from 1966 when he was living in New York.44 While the accuracy of his memories has not faded with the passing of years and the various renditions of Palas Street are surprisingly consistent across time, each iteration brings new details that nuance the whole by offering clues for understanding larger modes of inhabitation, as well as individual and collective practices. These different drawings build upon each other and articulate a reality that is both historically documented, and imagined, highly personal, and belonging to a community. They depict domestic scenes that are descriptive without being explicit in the way philosopher Gaston Bachelard has written about renditions of the oneiric house that one has grown up in: “[i]n order to suggest the values of intimacy, we have to induce in the reader a state of suspended reading.”45

At no. 4. The plan sketches of the childhood street and house and the interior perspective, all drawn in Ciudad Trujillo, rely upon, and talk to each other as architectural drawings that can be read together or separately, consistent without being redundant. Moreover, each and all of them invite Saul the child, Saul the adult, and us – his interlocutors – to complete the picture and fill in the gaps. As we move from the plan (Figure I.2.) to the vignette made in ink, pencil and watercolor (Figure I.3.), more details are constructing, and contributing to, the life of the family. If everyday objects are the actors in the plan drawings, people play the main part in this rendition of a domestic moment.

Let’s take a closer look at this tableau. The family is grouped around the table, but what is the time of the day? Joel Smith has written that “the artist’s family is seen breakfasting at home on Strada Palas (Palace Street) in Bucharest. Saul, ready for school in a uniform with an arm patch … assumes an outside observer’s role.”46 The setting of the table, however, indicates a

44 Other drawings are Bucharest in 1924 (1972) and several sketches and vignettes some undated, scribbled on sketchpads. 45 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 14. 46 Smith, Illuminations, 86. 109

late-day meal: the tureen and the saucepan suggest that soup (or a stew) and fried food are served, which in Romanian culinary tradition are part not of breakfast, but rather lunch or dinner. I propose that we are witnessing a different moment of the day and a different family dynamics: it is dinner time, when children have returned from school and parents from their daily chores; they have all gathered around the dinner table except for Saul who is stepping in, rather than out, from another space and another time.

The scene is washed in warm sepia tones: the color of the lamp hanging from the ceiling above the table matches that of the light outside and suggests a later time of the day, perhaps twilight or sundown. Only a few touches of color highlight the most important characters: Moritz and Rosa, Lica, little Saul, and the domestic help. The four members of the family are all dressed in black, somber and joyless. Joel Smith has remarked that “the servant, a Romany girl, is tinted red, after the same graphic convention used in period representations of American Indians.”47 In his autobiographic conversations with Aldo Buzzi, Steinberg recalled the condition of girls coming to the city from mountain villages to work as servants and who “were treated like savages from the jungle, like slaves” with no rights.48 Alluding to conditions of enslavement and servitude in general, the rendition of the bare-foot servant – a young girl, if we gauge her height in comparison to that of Steinberg’s seated parents, but mature beyond her age, if we look at her traits – gives us a brief glimpse into class and society inequalities in inter-war Romania.

Sitting upright, the father – the only one holding a glass – is probably drinking wine from the decanter at the center of the table, while the teal-glass bottle sitting on the floor next to his chair most likely contains seltzer water – another staple of Romanian dinners. Generations of children growing up in Romania have participated in the daily ritual of taking the seltzer-water bottles to be refilled, usually at small neighborhood convenience stores. Apparently withdrawn from the main gathering, Saul is stepping inside the room and examining everything with a grave look. Her thoughts elsewhere, Lica is sitting at the table with her parents. Described as

47 Smith, Illuminations, 86. 48 Steinberg and Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 4. 110

sleepiness,49 her pose and posture resemble the weariness from profound boredom that children often experience.

There is no visible interaction between parents and children who appear absent-minded and distracted. But are they bored or, rather, daydreaming? Steinberg has examined the blurring of boundaries between these two moods in several drawings. These representations describe that particular moment when, after gaining familiarity with certain habits and tasks, one slips from the boredom of routines into a state where imagination takes over the practicalities of reality. The structures of habitus build the auspicious circumstances in which boredom emerges as daydreaming, a metamorphosis that children are particularly prone to. Bachelard has observed that the experience of the house one was born in belongs to the realm of daydreaming rather than conscious thought.50 Starting from Alexander Dumas’s recollection of his own profound boredom as a six-year-old child, Bachelard has noticed the intertwining of boredom and daydreaming in children’s experience of the world as one of the paths that leads to nurturing imagination.51

It is a good thing, it is even salutary, for a child to have periods of boredom, for him to learn to know the dialectics of exaggerated play and causeless, pure boredom. … This [Dumas’s] is the kind of anecdote people tell in their memoirs. But how well it exemplifies absolute boredom, the boredom that is not the equivalent of the absence of playmates. There are children who will leave a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret. How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of all freedom!52

49 Smith, Illuminations, 86. 50 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 16. 51 “Alexander Dumas tells is his Memoirs that, as a child, he was bored, bored to tears. When his mother found him like that, weeping from sheer boredom, she said: “And what is Dumas crying about?” “Dumas is crying because Dumas has tears,” replied the six-year-old child.” (Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 16.) 52 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 16-17. 111

A common interpretation of Steinberg’s drawings is that he often assumes the viewpoint of a child as a mode of remembering.53 I propose that his perspective bridges the gap between the time of the drawing and the time of making the drawing. For a child, objects close to the floor - the stool, the water bottle, the dog - have a more prominent presence than for an adult. However, it is only from the height of a grown-up that one would notice – as these drawings show – the intricate decorations at the top of the wardrobes, the upper part of the window, and the rooftops of the storage sheds in the courtyard. Real or imagined, these details construct a mode of inhabitation that goes beyond the particular tastes of a specific family and offer a larger perspective on urban life in middle-class households at the beginning of the twentieth century. Upon closer inspection, the young Saul is not depicted as a child. He might be wearing a school uniform, but his serious profile and ceremonial posture suggest the maturity of an adult. As he will later recall, “ever since I was a child I have had a solemn name: Saul. It would have been undignified to apply the diminutive, Saulica, to the name of the king of the Israelites.”54

No one in the drawing is smiling, neither the adults, nor the children. With the rise of the Iron Guard and anti-Semitism, the interwar period is difficult for the Jewish community in Romania.55 At the time of making the drawing, Steinberg the adult is haunted by the of uncertainty and despair he experiences in the Dominican Republic and which is surreptitiously slipping into his childhood memories. Disguised as a child, wearing a child-looking mask the way he will wear so many other masks throughout his life, Steinberg returns to his house and reconstructs memories that are faithful not necessarily to the objective reality of the past, but to the structures of habitus.

Inhabitation. Is this scene unfolding in antreu (vestibule) or in casa (house)? Perhaps in both places at the same time. The servant bringing the food walks from the left to the right, as if she were coming from the kitchen door depicted in plan next to the antreu. Two pieces of

53 “Certain details (the table’s base assembly, bent into an unblinking eye; the blue-glass seltzer bottle) remind us that the remembered viewpoint is that of someone close to the floor.” (Smith, Illuminations, 86.) 54 Steinberg with Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 19. 55 The Iron Guard (Garda de Fier) was a far-right movement and political party active in Romania from 1927 through World War II with extreme nationalist, anti-Semitic, anti-communist and pro Orthodox views. 112

furniture are flanking the window in the center of the room. Like in the earlier plan drawing of the house we see the bufet (cupboard) to the right and the garderob vechiu (old wardrobe) to the left. The sketch of the old wardrobe drawn in plan has turned into a more elaborate piece in the color vignette. The large – and old – mirror on the wardrobe door catches faded reflections of the opposite side of the room: a chair and a sewing machine, perhaps a reference to his mother’s job as a young girl, but also to practices common to many households:

She had been working when a girl as a seamstress. Doing a trousseau for rich girls (in Buzău). She became a snob. Everything had to appear nice, we were dressed like cabbages. I remember a sailor outfit beige & light blue, soie ecru! The home was full of embroideries, curtains, draperies, antimacassars.56

The habit of decorating the house with doilies and antimacassars spread on tables, couches, chairs, and at windows has persisted as a common practice in Romanian households for decades, resisting political changes, modernization, and variations in taste or fashion. Steinberg himself has saved among his belongings pieces of embroidery most likely sent to him by relatives or friends from his home country.57

Steinberg’s rendition of the family scene is highly sensorial. The core of the story unfolds in the center of the vignette which is warmly lit by the gold shades shared by the lamp, the wine and the bread. The painting on the wall (or is it perhaps a tapestry or an embroidery?) shows roses in full bloom – Steinberg’s mother’s name was Roza (Rose) and Roza Steinberg was the de facto head of the family. Her husband as well as her children knew better than to raise her anger. In the drawing, the father strategically occupies the position right under the painting depicting a rose. Much later in his life, Steinberg will write in his diary: “Taticu, a frozen man – the fear of

56 Buzău is a Romanian city where Steinberg’s parents lived before he was born. Diary entry from Sunday, May 19, 1991 (Saul Steinberg Papers, UNCAT MSS 126, Box/Vol. 75) 57 See photos from archives. 113

Roza in his shoulders a paralyzed man. (When I first heard of Sub Rosa I said: That’s us! All of us Under Roza.)”58

Right behind the table, covered by gold embroidered curtains, the window opens into the courtyard, “the centerpiece,” as Steinberg later recalled, of “a society with no mysteries,” where “the doors were always open and anyone could look in the windows.”59 But mystery is far from missing in his renditions of times past. Through the window in the center of the room we find our way outside, into the courtyard and further away, above the storage area (magazie) indicated in the plan. The plan and the vignette reflect each other revealing corners, perspectives and angles otherwise impossible to grasp only from one drawing. Not unlike Velasquez’s painting Las Meninas, where a mirror shows the reflections of the queen and king situated outside the picture frame, the faded image in the wardrobe mirror is both a reflection of the opposite side of the room and a reflection from the past. As the wardrobe mirror looks back and inside the house, the frontal window looks forward and outside. The depth of the memory constructs the depth of the drawing, which – like a Cubist collage – simultaneously sees and overlaps, the inside and the outside, what is in front and what is behind, the casa and the antreu, the past and the present. The mirror and the window become devices for what Gyorgy Kepes has defined as “a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations,” but also of different temporal instances.60 Building upon Kepes’s observation, Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky have further elaborated the theory of the literal and phenomenal transparency, noting that “the transparent ceases to be that which is perfectly clear and becomes instead that which is clearly ambiguous.”61 Steinberg has constructed this “clear ambiguity” between boredom and daydreaming, different moments in time, and different places.

58 Saul Steinberg Papers, UNCAT MSS 126, Box/Vol. 75. Sub is the Romanian translation of under. 59 Steinberg with Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 21. 60Kepes cited in Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” Perspecta 8 (1963): 45. 61 Ibid., 45. 114

Strada Palas (1966)

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Inhabitation. In Shakespeare’s play “Romeo and Juliet,” Juliet tells Romeo that a name is an artificial convention, and that she is in love with the man by the name of "Montague," not with the Montague name. In love with Juliet, Romeo rejects his family name and vows to "deny (his) father" and instead be "baptized" as Juliet's lover.

Names, however, are not abstract entities, but witnesses of our thoughts. How we name people and things – nicknames, pet names, even derogatory names – speak of what things are for us and who we are in relation to them. Names establish complicities and open up the possibility of a conversation. Architects not only construct worlds, but also complicities with those who will inhabit their buildings, give them clues and hints through drawings and other artifacts. Masterfully constructing complicities with his viewers, Steinberg gradually makes them part of his world and eventually turns them from his spectators into his partners in conversation. One of his techniques is dissimulated ignorance – pretending not to know what he knows too well, a form of docta ignorantia (“learned ignorance”) that opens up the possibility for wondering and discovering the un-seen concealed behind the seemingly obvious and mundane.62 By hiding his clues in plain sight, Steinberg engages the imagination of his viewers to complete the drawings.

62 “I consider wondering (on whose account there is philosophizing) to precede the desire-for-knowing in order that the intellect (whose understanding is its being) will perfect itself by the study of truth.” (Nicholas of Cusa, De Docta Ignorantia, 4.) 115

Another drawing bearing the same title (Strada Palas), this time from 1966 (when Steinberg is fifty-two years old), seems to offer little that recalls Steinberg’s childhood street (Figure I.4.). So the question becomes: what’s in this name?

Made at a time when Steinberg had been in the United States for over twenty years, the drawing, however, does not bear an English title. An English speaker could maybe infer that strada means street and that Palas is its name. Perhaps the first question one would ask is where is this place situated?

The first clue he gives us is a flag with a crown in the center that tells us this place is situated somewhere in Romania, most likely between the two world wars when the country was a kingdom, not a republic.63 (Figure I.9.)

Palas is not only the name of the street, but it also resembles the Romanian word palat, that is palace or royal residence. And indeed, in the foreground we see a royal parade. An elegant horse-driven carriage occupies the center of the procession and the center of the drawing. Who are the characters marching in front of us? Riding the horse, comes the king. The sharp, bearded profile and aquiline nose together with the monogram inscribed on the saddle indicate that the royal figure is Ferdinand I, from the House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen (Figure I.10.). King of Romania from 1914 (the year of Steinberg’s birth) until his death in 1927, Ferdinand was married to Marie of Edinburgh with whom he had six children. Portrayed in the carriage, wearing crowns, sumptuous jewelry and luxurious outfits, Queen Marie and two of her children are accompanied by two ladies from the royal court. We infer that the time represented in the drawing is probably 1920-1925, most likely 1924, when Steinberg was ten – in several drawings

63 Romania became a republic after the forced abdication of King Michael I in 1947 under the pressure of the communist-dominated government which had fraudulently won the 1946 elections. 116

and collages made throughout his life he represented himself at this particular age and moment in time (Figure I.11.).64

However, as we already know, Palas is, most importantly, the name of Steinberg’s childhood street situated in a middle-class neighborhood with courtyards and shotgun houses, but also elegant three-storey-high modernist buildings. Describing the life on Palas Street Steinberg later wrote: “The hen was in the same family as the dog and the cat, a true domestic animal, while it was outrageous to have a duck in the kitchen. The goose came in with no fuss – it had authority. Chickens walked in with dancers’ steps, or at times a military gait.”65 And here it comes – the chicken! (Figure I.12.) Like in a fable, the chicken imitating the horse and the horse parading in the foreground, stand for characters with specific traits: the elegant dandy, full of himself and oblivious of the rest of the world, and his less-than-perfect copy aiming to replicate a distinction he does not, in fact, possess, and will never acquire. The destiny of the copy is to remain in the realm of simulated elegance. These characters are both human and architectural: in the middle-class environment where Steinberg grew up, shotgun houses and luxuriant courtyards coexisted with elegant three-level modernist buildings. In a socially and economically segregated society, people from different backgrounds inhabited an eclectic and vibrant neighborhood.

Palas is also the name of an asteroid discovered in 1802 and many streets in Steinberg’s neighborhood – itself called Uranus – bore the names of celestial bodies and constellations: Meteorilor, Minotaurului, Orfeu, Olimpului, Ceres, Jupiter, and Uranus.66 In Greek mythology, Palas was also the name of Athena, the goddess of wisdom that was worshipped on the Acropolis in Athens under many names and cults. One of her cult images was a piece of olive wood housed in the Erechteum temple. This piece was at the core of the Panathenea, the festival honoring Athena that was taking place every four years and during which her effigy was carried in a

64 See, for instance, Bucharest in 1921 (1970) or a collage in which the adult Steinberg is holding the hand of his 10- year old self. 65 Steinberg and Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 21. 66 Meteorites, Minotaur, Orpheus, Olympus, Ceres, Jupiter, Uranus (author’s translation.) 117

procession throughout the city. Steinberg constructs his own procession, his own festival dedicated to Palas that brings together myths, royalties, and commoners in the city.

Parades are a recurrent motif in Steinberg’s art and they contain the seeds of irony and parody. The orchestrated display of power, the ostentation and pomp associated with them offer him the opportunity to scratch their surface and discover the less-than-glamorous truths hidden behind. In 1991, two years after the fall of communism in Romania, watching a TV documentary about his homeland, Steinberg wrote in his diary: “Last night (ch. 13) brutal documentary of Romania made mostly of B + W Calea Victoriei followed by Marxist parades and all the terror of dictatorship: ritmic [sic] applause, infinite boredom. They learned nothing. More bloodshed to come.”67 The parade in Strada Palas from 1966 brings together real and mythical characters unlikely to co-exist in the same place who talk about habitus – the habitus embodied in the everyday life of ordinary people with their beliefs, customs, and traditions, and the constructed habitus of official processions and their display of power.

With the passage of time, memories fabricate a construction that intertwines reality and fiction. Bringing together real and mythical characters unlikely to co-exist in the same place, Steinberg positions Palas Street in a physical, yet invented city. Opening the parade, the priest carrying a cross and a censer is pointing, perhaps, to certain social habits and customs at work in the Bucharest between the two world wars. (Figure I.13.) Next to the priest, Steinberg places Death, a character holding a sword and a flag with a bull’s head, where the latter is a reference to an earlier Romanian flag. How is one to interpret this association? Daunting childhood presences, lingering in one’s memory? An ironical take on concealed forms of governance? An immutable memento mori? Or, perhaps, a sarcastic celebration of beginning and end, heaven and hell, walking hand in hand? One becomes the other in a world where the boundaries between good and evil are often fluid and transgressions are common. Growing up Jewish in an increasingly anti-Semitic world, left deep marks on Steinberg the child: “I had no rights, and went to school wearing a name plate with a number, like an automobile. […]. And above all, as

67 Journal entry from Thursday July 4th, 1991. (Saul Steinberg Papers, UNCAT MSS 126, Box/Vol. 75.) 118

long as you had no money, you couldn’t enjoy the dreadful freedoms of Romania, which were invariably abuses, or lead the life of a gentleman, the sort of man who, if he has money, can always find people to buy,”68 he recollected about his childhood in Bucharest.

Coming of age in Bucharest in the early decades of the twentieth century, Steinberg had experienced first-hand the social and urban turmoil of the Romanian capital in the aftermath of World War I. The post-war agreements between the powers involved in the conflict had immediate geographical and demographical consequences for the Kingdom of Romania. Following the Trianon treaty, Romania acquired Transylvania and two-thirds of Banat from Hungary, Bukovina from Austria, Bessarabia from Russia, and consequently its land mass and population doubled.69 According to a 1930 census, 29.1% of the population consisted of minorities and thus a former ethnically uniform country was confronted with new identity issues.70 Part of this search for identity was a new awareness of Eastern Orthodoxy as an integral part of being Romanian. The complex history of failures in the process of building a national cathedral, illustrates the struggle to define the complicated relationship between political and religious powers and the very designation of the cathedral is reflective of this tension.71 The various names successively assigned to this project reflect a gradual shift from looking at the building merely as a religious symbol (Christ’s Resurrection in 1881), to bringing together nation-building and religion (The Cathedral of the Nation in 1891), and, eventually, to claiming a collective historical restoration (The Cathedral for the Redemption of the Nation in1920). In this context, the Romanian capital, as well as smaller provincial towns, frequently witnessed acts of anti-Semitism and xenophobia, which led to discrimination and violence.

Mixing fact and fiction, Steinberg’s festival brings forward the eclectic demographics of the Romanian society: crowned heads, regular people, religious figures, and symbolic characters.

68 Steinberg and Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 3. 69 Tom Gallagher, Theft of a Nation (London: Hurst & Co., 2005), 29; Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 43. 70 Scurtu and Buzatu 1996, 22 quoted in Gallagher, 29. 71 Andreea Mihalache, “Between Church and State: The Competition for the Romanian Patriarchal Cathedral, Bucharest, 2002” in The Architectural Competition: Research, Inquiries, Experiences, eds. M. Ronn, R. Kazemian, J. E. Anderson (Stockholm: Axl Books, 2010), 490-507. 119

Among them, the Muslim street vendor closing the parade is rendered vibrantly in golden tones (Figure I.14.). Selling braga, salep, sesame, and Turkish delight, Muslim vendors were a fairly common presence in the streets of Bucharest at the beginning of the twentieth century.72

At no. 4. Starting with an Eastern Orthodox priest and ending with a Muslim street vendor, this unlikely procession speaks about the city and its inhabitants, about the ordinary and the extraordinary, the time of the everyday and the time of the festival. Royals become commoners and commoners become royals. With ruthless irony, Steinberg cuts a cross section through the Romanian society between the two World Wars. As the drawing unfolds along two parallel lines, two parades seem to exist in parallel universes: the royal procession and the parade of Steinberg’s middle-class neighborhood that, despite their differences, cannot exist without each other and have more in common than revealed at a first glance.

In the upper left part of the drawing we begin to see one end of Palas Street: the houses with their gardens, fences, and luxuriant vegetation – particular features of the city fabric at the beginning of the twentieth century (Figure I.15.). The earlier sketches from 1941 made in Ciudad Trujillo marked in plan the presence of oţetari (Figure I.2.) – in this 1966 drawing they are vividly depicted in bright colors (Figure I.15.). Rhus typhina, or staghorn sumac, the oţetar is an ornamental tree whose fruit is a dense cluster of red drupes; the plant flowers from May to July and the fruit ripens until September. In the fall, the foliage turns to luxurious shades of red, orange and yellow. What was an annotation in the 1941 plan becomes decades later, in 1966, a lavish garden that captures the royal golden shades of the staghorn sumac, punctured by the blood-red color of its fruit.

At the other end of the street we see a rather curious collection of buildings (Figure I.16.). The warehouse-looking construction on top of a hill is the arsenal, a building housing weapons and ammunition. Palas Street was located in the proximity of the Arsenal, the building

72 Both braga and salep are drinks that originated in the Ottoman empire. Braga is a refreshing drink made from fermented grains (wheat, millet, etc.). Salep is obtained from grinding the bulbs of certain orchids and is used in the preparation of a hot drink with milk, for making ice cream or in traditional medicine. 120

that gave the name to the hill on which it was situated – Dealul Arsenalului (the Arsenal Hill). At the bottom of the hill Steinberg sketches a cemetery and the towers of a church, the pendants of the Priest and the Death characters opening the royal parade in the foreground. Palas Street was located between two streets both of which were bearing the names of two old local churches (Schitu Maicilor and Antim). As Bucharest was thriving in the 1920s, modernist architecture was on the rise. In an eclectic neighborhood like Uranus (where Strada Palas belonged), new, modernist immeubles de rapport coexisted next to picturesque houses that in Steinberg’s rendition resemble cheerful Romanian embroidery.73

Dor. As one reads the drawing from left to right and from right to left, the eye keeps returning to the center of the image (Figure 1). And how do we know that is the focal point? Strategically placed right above the overpowering image of the king riding the horse, this center is protected by an oversized tree hovering in the background whose color matches the green color of the king’s royal cape-lining. Everything points to this space as the most important part of the drawing (Figure I.4).

At the center, we see a courtyard that appears huge, just like in our childhood memories when our mind remembers things and places much larger than they actually are. In this 1966 drawing of the Strada Palas, the street lamp outside the fence and the water pump inside are present in the exact same position registered in Steinberg’s memory 25 years earlier, in 1941 in Ciudad Trujillo. To the right, just as it has been depicted in 1941, there is the entrance to Sander, marked by a classical pediment mounted on two columns, carefully detailed along with the windows and even the brickwork. However, this is not the focus of the drawing.

Recessed from the street, we see Steinberg’s childhood home. Its physical dimensions and those of the courtyard were in reality much smaller, but what makes them larger-than-life is the people, events, and stories that construct a depth of memories otherwise invisible. How do all

73 A housing typology developed in Paris from the eighteenth century onward, the immeuble de rapport is a multi- storey building with apartments for rent and / or purchase that was assimilated in Romanian architecture, particularly in Bucharest at the turn of the twentieth century. In many instances, these buildings provided opportunities for experimenting with the emerging modernist architecture. 121

these fragments of inhabitation come together? Why did Steinberg continually return to a not- particularly happy childhood and keep drawing that modest, yet royal, house year after year, despite his open contempt for his country of birth? If every history is a story, then how are they woven at 4, Strada Palas?

And Beyond. An inconspicuous detail reappears in different renditions of Strada Palas throughout the years. In the upper left corner of the 1941 sketch from Ciudad Trujillo, the eye is drawn to this detail by the thick, heavy lines that reverse the drawing conventions usually requiring the use of sharp, dark outlines in the foreground and fuzzy, blurred lines in the background (Figure I.17.). The family dinner vignette made the same year and entitled Strada Palas, guides us toward this detail by the central strip of sepia sky shimmering between the gold embroidered curtains (Figure I.18.). The 1966 view of Strada Palas renders this minuscule object next to the oversized tree, larger than the houses themselves and hovering above them (Figure I.19.).

This discreet detail is a fragile ladder leading to a closed door – the door to the pod (attic)? A door to the sky? Or perhaps a door to nowhere? As Steinberg consistently remembers and brings it into presence, the ladder speaks of wanderlust and desire to escape. The adult attempts to free himself from the memories of his alter-ego child and the convoluted feelings about his homeland, perhaps from the past, as well as from the present. In the story of Jacob’s ladder, the angelic stairway opened up the path to dreams and to a world invisible through the eyes of the mind, yet engraved in the bodily action of climbing up and down the stair. Describing the childhood home as an “oneiric house, a house of dream-memory” that is “physically inscribed in us,” Gaston Bachelard wrote:

After all these years, in spite of all the other anonymous stairways, we would recapture the reflexes of the “first stairway,” we would not stumble on that rather high step. The

122

house’s entire being would open up, faithful to our being. We would push the door that creaks with the same gesture, we would find our way in the dark to the distant attic.74

Steinberg’s stairway to the attic joins dor as homesickness with dor as wanderlust, the complicated mood that constantly drives him toward, and at the same time away from, his memories. Dor constructs the scaffolding of his drawings, reminding him (and us) about the intricate connections between here and there, now and then, love and hate. Dor and daydreaming inhabit the ladder to the garret as a place of becoming, of not-yet there, full of possibilities. Steinberg reshuffles the objects in the memory box at no. 4 re-writing over and over again the same, though different,c onfabulations.

Epilogue

Steinberg’s old neighborhood no longer exists. In the 1980s, the area was targeted by the communist regime to become the location of the brand-new civic center envisioned as a center of political and administrative power. The entire hill (Dealul Arsenalului) was leveled and the 19th century Uranus neighborhood was torn down together with churches, the Old Arsenal, other historic and architectural monuments, as well as ordinary houses that had witnessed simple, everyday life. Steinberg never returned to his homeland and made all these drawings from his childhood memories kept alive through period photographs, postcards that he had been collecting for some time, and memorabilia brought to him by friends who were traveling to Bucharest.

The tragic end of Strada Palas that – along with the entire neighborhood – was buried under communist bulldozers recalls the ancient story of the Greek Simonides of Ceos recorded by Cicero in his De Oratore. Simonides was invited to the dinner party of a wealthy noble man in whose honor he composed an ode. To the displeasure of the host, the ode, however, also honored Castor and Pollux, the twin deities who were patrons of hunters and horsemen. When two mysterious young men requested Simonides’s presence outside the house, the roof of the

74 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 15. 123

dining hall caved in and everyone inside was killed. Simonides, the only survivor saved by the two gods in disguise, was able to identify the guests buried under the rubble by remembering their physical positions in the triclinium.75

Architecture remembers us and we remember architecture. Not unlike Simonides, years after Strada Palas had crumbled, Steinberg recalls people through their houses, and houses through their people. Boredom and daydreaming, the ordinary and the extraordinary, embodied and constructed forms of habitus are brought to life in his fictions.

75 In the Roman dining hall (triclinium), people were seated not on movable chairs, like in modern dining rooms, but on fixed benches made of wood or stone that were an integral part of the architecture of the room. 124

First Interlude. Figures.

Figure I.1. Steinberg’s drawing of his childhood street in Bucharest, from a journal, December 1940-January 1943; Saul Steinberg Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.2. Steinberg’s drawing of his childhood street in Bucharest, from a journal, December 1940-January 1943; Saul Steinberg Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

125

Figure I.3. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1942. Ink, pencil, and watercolor on paper, 37.8 x 55.2 cm. The Saul Steinberg Foundation, New York. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.4. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor, gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 x 73.7 cm; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America-Israel Cultural Foundation; Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

126

Figure I.5. Photographs of Strada Palas. Unknown author. Saul Steinberg Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.6. Postcards from Romania. Saul Steinberg Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.7. Copies of maps of Bucharest. Saul Steinberg Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

127

Figure I.8. Steinberg’s drawing of his childhood street in Bucharest, from a journal, December 1940-January 1943; Saul Steinberg Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.9. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Detail. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor, gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 x 73.7 cm; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America- Israel Cultural Foundation; Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.10. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Detail. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor, gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 x 73.7 cm; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America- Israel Cultural Foundation; Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

128

Figure I.11. Saul Steinberg. Collage of himself as a child and an adult. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.12. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Detail. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor, gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 x 73.7 cm; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America- Israel Cultural Foundation; Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.13. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Detail. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor, gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 x 73.7 cm; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America- Israel Cultural Foundation; Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

129

Figure I.14. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Detail. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor, gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 x 73.7 cm; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America- Israel Cultural Foundation; Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.15. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Detail. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor, gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 x 73.7 cm; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America- Israel Cultural Foundation; Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.16. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Detail. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor, gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 x 73.7 cm; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America- Israel Cultural Foundation; Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

130

Figure I.17. Steinberg’s drawing of his childhood street in Bucharest, from a journal, December 1940-January 1943. Detail. Saul Steinberg Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure I.18. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1942. Detail. Ink, pencil, and watercolor on paper, 37.8 x 55.2 cm. The Saul Steinberg Foundation, New York. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

131

Figure I.19. Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor, gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 x 73.7 cm; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America-Israel Cultural Foundation; Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

132

Chapter 2: Between Boredom and Flatness

Introduction

Less is a bore and the decorated shed are arguably two of the most significant contributions that Robert Venturi (later with Denise Scott Brown) has brought to architectural theory. Published six years apart, in 1966 and, respectively, 1972, the two propositions contain the seeds of a curious paradox. The former, in response to Mies van der Rohe’s dictum Less is more, is a direct critique of modernist architectural language and implies a re-valorization of the excess and surplus carefully shunned by modern architects. The latter, while reducing a meaningful building to a structure with applied decoration is both more and less: more ornament and less architecture. Venturi was no stranger to ideas about paradox: from his early projects published in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, he has programmatically employed flat and plain surfaces while at the same time stating: “the examples chosen [in the book] reflect my partiality for certain eras: Mannerist, Baroque and Rococo especially.”1 The numerous precedents showed in his book support his position. On the one hand, he championed flat surfaces in architecture, but on the other hand, he turned toward an architecture of complex and convoluted surfaces. How are we to explain this paradox? How are we to understand this apparent inconsistency of thought? Are these two positions contradictory or do they perhaps stem from the same source? Is the paradox of both/and first articulated as a theoretical position in the “gentle manifesto” and later illustrated in his own practice, a rhetorical device meant to validate any type of approach, or, perhaps, does it stem from different sources?

A biographical detail largely overlooked in architectural scholarship is Venturi’s upbringing as a Quaker. I propose that the Quaker influence accounts for his particular understanding of paradox, of a world in which apparently opposite positions coexist simultaneously, where a theory of both/and is not only legitimate, but, more important, resourceful. From this particular perspective, flat surfaces have depth, less and more are not contradictory concepts, and a remedy to modernist boredom may emerge, in fact, from plain planes, which are cut, reshaped, and reassembled.

1 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition (New York: MoMA, 2002), 13. 133

The appeal of both Venturi and Mies’s quips lies in their rather obscure and ambiguous nature, which to this day allows for a rich range of interpretations and paraphrases. As such, they have become common places in the architectural vocabulary. At a closer inspection, their opposition is not that clear. “Less is more” encompasses some of the modernist principles associated with a minimalist approach to architecture: stripping off ornament, minimizing costs through prefabrication and standardization, exposing structure and the nature of materials, streamlining design, in short simplifying. I suggest that “Less is a bore” proposes another type of simplicity, which, Venturi will elaborate, results from people’s direct understanding of the architectural form as symbol. In fact, in Complexity and Contradiction, Venturi distinguishes between simplicity and simpleness (or simplification), criticizing the latter, not the former. “Where simplicity cannot work, simpleness results. Blatant simplification means bland architecture. Less is a bore.”2

To an untrained eye, Venturi’s early projects appear, in fact, rather unsophisticated and “boring,” begging the question of how to interpret his statement manifesto, on the one hand, and his acceptance of simplicity, on the other. Although never stated explicitly as a theoretical position, “less is a bore” begins to theorize the “architectural boring” as a matter of architectural form. The motto rightly recognizes architectural boredom as a legitimate concern but, as we will see in the third chapter, opens the way to understanding the dichotomy boring – interesting as the main concern of architectural practice.

Venturi’s interest in the flatness of commercial billboards as an inspiration for architecture is grounded in the general ethos of the time, but also, an aspect unaccounted for, in his own Quaker upbringing. This chapter examines the intersections between Venturi’s Quaker background (and particularly the concept of paradox in Quaker doctrine) and the culture of billboards in mid-century America. Venturi’s approach to simplicity and flatness was rooted in the apparent oxymoron plain and fancy, a common concept in Quaker culture. I propose an alternative reading of Venturi’s interest in flatness. A largely unquestioned view, which he has affirmed repeatedly, posits the direct influence of commercial billboards on his architectural theory and practice. However, I suggest that a more nuanced understanding of his position

2 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed., 17. 134

should take into account Quaker beliefs and practices, with their emphasis on paradox, bi- dimensional, flat art, and understated presence.

Architectural and cultural theorists such as Kenneth Frampton and Karsten Harries have strongly criticized the use of billboards in architecture, and specifically Venturi’s interest in commercial advertising, from an ethical standpoint.3 I propose to examine how Venturi’s use of billboards in architecture introduces a mode of perception that turns the active inhabitant of architecture into a passive spectator primarily through two conditions: the distraction (with its double meaning of entertainment and lack of attention) inherent to the nature of billboards and their frontality. Boredom is central to this conversation, as billboards ultimately propose a solution to the problem of modern tedium through distraction, visual overstimulation, and message whose meaning is direct, and immediate. The flatness of the surface cannot be dissociated from the flatness of meaning.

The first section discusses Venturi’s Quaker upbringing and the role of paradox in Quaker thought and culture. The second one looks at the presence of commercial billboards in the midcentury landscape and the mode of perception they engender through distraction and frontality. The third part, proposes speculative readings of three of Venturi’s projects where ideas borrowed from billboard design are intertwined, more or less explicitly, with ideas drawn from Quaker aesthetics and practice. The three projects are his Princeton thesis design for a Chapel for the Episcopal Academy in Merion, PA (1950), the billdingboard; the entry of the firm Venturi and Rauch for the National Football Hall of Fame competition (1967); and the Guild House in Philadelphia, PA (1963-1966).

2.1. Learning from the Friends

Robert Venturi’s Quaker upbringing. The Quakers (or the Society of Friends) have historic ties with the state of Pennsylvania in general and the city of Philadelphia in particular. Critics have largely disregarded the influence of their beliefs and aesthetics on Venturi’s work. An exception is a short article by Esther McCoy, Venturi’s long-time friend, who proposed that

3 Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000); Kenneth Frampton, “America 1960-1970: Note on an Urban Imagery and Theory,” Casabella No. 359-360 (1971): 24-38 135

his connection with the Quakers offered possible clues to his “strict code of ethics and his love of simplicity.”4 Commenting on the plans of the Vanna Venturi House (Figure 2.1.), the Guild House (Figure 2.2.), and the North Penn Visiting Nurses Association (Figure 2.3.), McCoy remarked they were in disagreement with the Modernist space, and carried a conflict between “the German mysticism of the universal space,” on the one hand, and Venturi’s Italian roots and Quaker education, on the other. Further, she interpreted the plan of the Vanna Venturi House as a “safe and sound Quaker letter in second person singular.”5

Against the general background of Quaker Philadelphia, the Society of Friends has had a significant, though discreet presence in Venturi’s life. In several interviews given over the years, he has unassumingly mentioned his affiliation with the Friends, however without further elaborating on any possible influence they might have had on his thinking.

Toward the end of his architectural studies, Venturi was planning to join the American Friends Service:

“I was brought up as a Friend. I acquired my training from the sympathetic attitude and convictions in my home and at Friends Meeting which my family joined in 1931. … I have been influenced by no one individual, the Society of Friends has no minsters – but have relied generally upon the principles of my religious education. … As a student immediately interested in architecture, and one whose opinions have only recently been clarified, I have had little opportunity until now expressively to demonstrate my conviction beyond intimate conversation. My application for and probable future service with the American Friends Service after I will have finished my formal education in June demonstrate my belief.”6

Maybe part of a local tradition, but perhaps also related to Venturi’s family’s affiliation with the Friends, a catalogue of Quaker publications was sent to the newlyweds Venturi and

4 Esther McCoy, Robert Venturi, “To Whom It May Concern,” in Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader, ed. Susan Morgan. (Los Angeles: East of Borneo, 2012), 293. 5 Ibid., 294. 6 An undated document from the Architectural Records of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown at the Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania shows the commitment of the young Robert Venturi to the cause of the Friends. (225.RV.113) 136

Scott Brown after their wedding in July 1967.7 Venturi has been exposed to Quakerism both in his education (he attended grade school at Lansdowne Friends School) and at home. Although his parents were of Italian Catholic descent, his mother initiated the conversion of the entire family to Quakerism and the three of them began to attend Quaker meetings on Sunday. Describing his upbringing in a book celebrating the Italian heritage of noted Americans, Venturi explained his parents’ conversion:

My mother and father were born Catholics but did not practice. When I was about five years old, they decided they needed a religious affiliation for my sake. Being a pacifist, my mother was attracted to the Quakers because of their stand against the war, and so she became a member of the Society of Friends. My father went along with her and the three of us went to meeting on Sunday morning. I was sent to a Friends School in Philadelphia. … I went to Landsowne Friends School until I was ten years old.8

In an interview from 1995, Denise Scott Brown found two sources of the concern with social justice of the Venturi-Scott Brown partnership: her African upbringing and Venturi’s Quaker background:

A heritage of Socialism and Quakerism in Bob’s family and my African social and racial concerns, tied in with movements for social justice in America of the 1960s, have caused us to try in our practice to join social concern with design and to remain committed as architects to achieving social justice.9

In an interview published in Perspecta in 2008, Venturi simply stated: “I was an Italian- American Quaker.”10 In a 2009 interview posted on the architectural website ArchDaily, Denise Scott Brown credited her mother-in-law for Venturi’s interest in social issues. Scott Brown

7 The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, 225.II.F.1553. 8 The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, (225.II.F.1037, Box 70). This is the manuscript of the chapter “Robert Venturi: Upbringing among Quakers,” in Growing Up Italian, ed. Linda Brandi Cateura (New York. William Morrow and company, Inc., 1987). See also the interview part of the oral history project of the Archives of the American Art. 9 “Learning from Africa,” interview with Denise Scott Brown, The Zimbabwean Review (July 1995, 29): 26-29. 10 “Is and Ought: Interview with Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi,” Perspecta 41 (Dec. 2008): 38. 137

described Vanna Venturi as “a socialist and a pacifist.” To which Venturi added: “And a Quaker.”11

I propose that Venturi’s architectural theory of both/and, his admiration for “elements which are hybrid rather than “pure,” compromising rather than “clean,” distorted rather than “straightforward,” ambiguous rather than “articulated,” boring as well as “interesting” … redundant rather than simple, … inconsistent and equivocal rather than direct and clear,”12 builds upon a tension inherent to the Quaker doctrine. Manifested at different levels, it is the tension between the spiritual world and the material world, inclusion and exclusion, revelation and concealment. While the Quakers embrace a set of beliefs that is inclusive of all human beings, welcomes diversity and is non-judgmental, at the same time they set themselves apart from the world as a separate group.13 The contradictory nature of being “in the world, but not of it” complicates the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical where the latter is not manifested in the former. The expression “live in the world, but not of it” is attributed to the English rebel George Fox, who in the seventeenth century founded the Religious Society of Friends.14

As simplicity and excess are contentious subjects in the Quaker doctrine, Venturi relies upon and at the same time departs from the Quaker paradigm of simplicity. Brought up in the tradition of Philadelphia-based Quakerism, he was most certainly familiar with the Quaker principles that separate spiritual matters from material ones: the individual has access to spirituality not through their own will, but through the Inner Light. Manifested only through revelations, the Inner Light does not engage with the sensible world. Quakers passively wait for and receive revelation in a physical world devoid of spiritual qualities. There are no corporeal mediators between the divine and the human. This act of passive waiting might contain the seeds

11 Interview with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown conducted by Andrea Tamas in August 2009 accessed January 29, 2014, ArchDaily April 25, 2011 http://www.archdaily.com/130389/interview-robert-venturi-denise- scott-brown-by-andrea-tamas/. 12 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 16. 13 Anne Verplanck, “The Silhouette and Quaker Identity in Early National Philadelphia,” Winterthur Portfolio Vol. 43 No. 1 (Spring, 2009):48-49. 14 Susan Garfinkel, “Letting in “the World: (Re)interpretive Tensions in the Quaker Meeting House,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture Vol. 5 (1995): 87, note 2. 138

of what Venturi and Scott Brown will later refer to as “deferred judgment.”15 However, the very same act of patient waiting could instill a boredom resulted from the disengagement with the physical realm and a dearth of worldly experiences. Venturi’s early exposure to Quaker practices has most likely influenced his attitude toward material culture. His focus on architectural surfaces, his interest in iconology expressed through words and letters, his emphasis on correctly deciphering signs and symbols, and the collective dimension of a message shared and understood by the entire community, are fundamental to understanding the Quaker mode of being in the world. Venturi’s exposure to paradox had more than one origin. T.S. Eliot, one of his main sources of inspiration (who was brought up as a Unitarian, converted to Anglicanism and proclaimed himself Anglo-Catholic), embraced contradictory positions and commented that his religious views combined a “Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament.”16

However, if Quaker aesthetics favors simplicity, starkness and lack of ornamentation, dear also to architectural modernism, then why is Venturi moving away from the modernist tenets?17 Would he not feel more comfortable with the puritanism of Mies and his followers? Faithful to and discovering the richness of his Italian heritage, he is fascinated with the exuberance of Mannerist and Baroque architectures fundamentally opposed to Quakers’ strict visual code. So how does he reconcile the two types of aesthetics? How does he move between Quaker minimalism and Mannerist excess?

Venturi’s statement Less is a bore is more than a pun on Mies’ Less is more. In the previous chapter, we saw that Venturi’s quip did not exist in a vacuum, nor did it suddenly manifest a new and unusual interest in boredom, but rather it brought together ideas and concerns already part of the ethos of the time. The closing line of Venturi’s “gentle manifesto” – More is not less – gives us another clue for reading Less is a bore.18 Venturi himself identified the sources of his manifesto in Baroque and Mannerist architecture, literary theories, New Criticism

15 It was Denise Scott Brown who first proposed “deferred judgment” as the attitude the designer should have toward the world. Inspired from Ed Rusha’s photography which she uses to illustrate her article “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35:3 (1969): 184-186. 16 “On Poetry and Poets,”209. 17 Frederick B. Tolles suggested that “Much of modern architecture … is only a reassertion of the principle which guided the builders of the early Quaker meeting houses.” Frederick. B. Tolles, “’Of the Best Sort but Plain:’ The Quaker Esthetic,” American Quarterly Vol. 11, No. 4 (Winter, 1959): 74. 18 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 16. 139

and Pop Art. His “not-straightforward architecture”19 embraced the entire variety of directions, trends and aspects of life, an attitude that has also been central to the Friends’ relationship with the world. Venturi never acknowledged his early upbringing as an inspiration for his architectural theories – however, it would be unlikely for a Friend to be outspoken on faith issues. The Quakers, in spite of their active involvement with social causes, have generally preferred to keep a low profile and avoid public visibility. More is not less, which in Complexity and Contradiction precedes the argument that Less is a bore, implies, I suggest, the paradoxical idea that it is complex and contradictory forms that carry simple and clear messages.

The Quaker paradox: ‘In the World, but not of It.’20 Tying together professional and personal narratives, Venturi has portrayed himself as an outsider. His early childhood years spent in private schools put a distance between him and the neighborhood children; as an architect, he felt relegated to the frontier of the profession due to his unconventional views opposed to mainstream architectural movements. He has assumed (and relished) this fringe condition along with his wife, herself an émigré, uprooted from her native South Africa, to London, and later Philadelphia.21 On the other hand, the history of the Quakers as a religious group is rooted in persecutions, marginality, and silent resistance. For the young architect, this genealogy might have created an environment where standing up against conventions is a necessary moral act. We will see how the tension inherent in Quaker spirituality has spawned a particular relationship between the physical and the metaphysical, manifested in works of art and architecture.

The Quaker doctrine derives, and at the same time, distances itself from the tenets of the Puritan Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century England. Discontent with the teachings and practices of the Church of England, George Fox, the son of a puritan churchwarden, began to seek salvation outside the official church. He founded the Religious Society of Friends, or the

19 Ibid., 16. 20 The expression “live in the world, but not of it” is attributed to the founder George Fox: Susan Garfinkel, “Letting in “the World: (Re)interpretive Tensions in the Quaker Meeting House,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture Vol. 5 (1995): 87, note 2. 21 Venturi and Scott Brown discuss this theme at length in Robert Venturi, “Upbringing among Quakers,” in Growing Up Italian, ed. Linda Brandi Cateura, (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1997): 195-201 and Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, “Is and Ought: Interview with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown,” Perspecta 41: 37-41. 140

Quakers, and spent his life traveling and preaching throughout Britain, Europe and America.22 The expression “live in the world, but not of it” is attributed to Fox as a way of describing the inherent tension present in the Quaker way of life.

American Quakerism began with the English-born Quaker William Penn who came to North America in 1682 and later founded the province of Pennsylvania and the city of Philadelphia. Embedded in the history and perception of the city, an implicit notion of paradox has loomed large in various historic studies about Philadelphia. In 1963, historian Nathaniel Burt described the city as a negotiation between plain Quakers and fancy Episcopalians, an enigma for outsiders, a place “devoted to moderation but fond of good living,” where the myth of a joyless population coexists with that of a snobbish, but pleasure oriented “fox-hunting aristocracy.” 23

The Quakers aesthetics originates in the larger Protestant views on plain style born in the seventeenth century in reaction to the Catholic Baroque. Historian Susan Garfinkel has argued that “Quaker theology has within it a fundamental crisis of representation. All expressive behaviors, whether spoken, enacted, or built, function as embodiments of this conflict.”24 Recent scholarship has begun to acknowledge the complex nature of this tension and the constant travails of the Society of Friends to reconcile their theology with the pressures and demands of modern life. This paradox has been at the core of the Quaker material culture: while the physical world was stripped off metaphysical content, craftsmanship is highly valued; while meeting houses (the Quaker places of communal worship) have never been sacred spaces, they have always acted as depositories of historical and cultural genealogies.

22 The origin of the name Quaker is uncertain. According to Robert Barclay, a prominent 17th century writer belonging to the Religious Society of Friends, the name reflects the devotion of some members of the group who would start quaking while making their pronouncements. (http://www.tempequakers.org/FAQ.htm#six Accessed on Jan. 30, 2014) A different interpretation suggests that the name is a derogatory term that originated in a discussion between King George and William Penn: when the latter refused to take his hat off in front of his majesty telling him he should be “Quaking before the Lord,” the king responded “Get this quaker out of here.” (http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~quakers/quakhist.htm Accessed January 30, 2014) Another account states that George Fox, who had been imprisoned several times due to his beliefs, was doing time in Derby in 1650 when he asked Justice Bennett to tremble at the word of Lord, hence the latter called him “Quaker.” (A. Neave Brayshaw, The Quakers: Their Story and Message (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1938), 43) 23 Nathaniel Burt, “Philadelphia Plain and Fancy,” Horizon Vol. V Issue 6 (1963): 5. 24 Susan Garfinkel, “Letting in “the World: (Re)interpretive Tensions in the Quaker Meeting House,” 85. 141

The main source for understanding Quaker foundational beliefs is Robert Barclay’s Apology for the True Christian Divinity, originally written in Latin and first issued in English in 1678.25 The key concept in Quaker theology is the Inward Light of Christ that, as historian J. William Frost points out, contains the essence of Quakerism, but also the seeds of its paradoxes. The Inner Light or the Light Within is the only form of divine agency accessible to people. The emphasis on inward reveals distrust for formalized liturgy and worship; the emphasis on of Christ suggests “the sameness of revelation for all,” pleading indirectly for orthodoxy and church government; the association of the inward, the of Christ and the light places the Quakers in a position where they could claim a “completely subjective, yet paradoxically objective, interpretation of Scripture.”26

The paradoxical elements in Quaker thought and activities have often led to a misunderstanding of the Friends. … Quakers could be intellectuals and yet anti- intellectual, social activists and mystics, evangelical and quietistic, complacent and insecure, intent on making money and anxious to avoid being wealthy, dogmatic and nontheological, tolerant and strict.27

Architectural metaphors occupy a particular place in understanding Quaker spirituality. Paraphrasing historian Arnold J. Toynbee, Quaker thinker Howard H. Brinton has explained Friends’ attitude toward life as a negotiation between “withdrawal and return,” or action and contemplation.28 Simple action is meaningless just as “action in building a brick house requires attention to one brick at a time, and yet one brick by itself is meaningless.”29 The part or the unit acquires significance only in relation to the whole. Pure contemplation, on the other hand, is likewise meaningless, just as “the builder who spends his time gazing at a blueprint,” or “the musician who ponders his score and never strikes a note” become so absorbed in the object of their own contemplation that they end up being dominated by it, and thus losing their free choice.30 Both action and contemplation are required for a rich and truthful life. While this

25 J. William Frost, The Quaker Family in Colonial America: A Portrait of the Society of Friends (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973): 10-11. 26 Frost, The Quaker Family in Colonial America, 25-26. 27 Frost, The Quaker Family in Colonial America, 217. 28 Howard H. Brinton, Friends for 350 Years 11th ed. (Wallingford, Penn.: Pendle Hill Publications, 2002): 75-76. 29 Ibid., 75-76. 30 Ibid., 76. 142

paradox constitutes the core of the Quaker doctrine about spiritual and material life, a similar paradox – that of both/and – lies at the core of Venturi’s architectural thinking.

Four main principles or testimonies guide Quaker life: community, equality, simplicity and harmony.31 Unlike other religious practices that exercise silence as a form of worship (such as Zen meditation), what distinguishes the Quakers is the idea of the community. The worshipers sit together in silence waiting for the divine message to descend upon and utter through one of them. The act of recognizing the “still, small voice” is of crucial importance in Quaker worship, but “there is no sure test of divine guidance in this or any other undertaking”32 and “no rules can be laid down for Quaker ministry.”33 A tension thus emerges between silent reflection and the need for communication.34 Quaker harmony infers the unity of action without force. Equality does not imply egalitarianism in terms of economic or social status, but respect and consideration across class, race, social or religious distinctions.35 Of the four tenets, simplicity is probably one of the most controversial topics in Quaker doctrine. The general understanding of this testimony is that simplicity must be understood as the absence of the unnecessary, of the superfluous, of those things that clutter life. Rather than an exterior expression, simplicity is a form of sincerity and genuineness.36

The paradox of being “in the world but not of it,” a simultaneous condition of inclusion and exclusion, has shaped Friends’ attitudes toward all the manifestations of material culture from exterior garb to architecture. Quaker clothing from the seventeenth century, for instance, removed the dress ornamentation characteristic to the age of Stuart kings,37 but that same simplification made the members of the Society of Friends appear more conspicuous than they

31 Ibid., 153-174. 32 Ibid., 103-104. 33 Ibid., 106. 34 Garfinkel, “Letting in “the World:” (Re)interpretive Tensions in the Quaker Meeting House,” 78. 35 Brinton, Friends for 350 Years, 160. Part of this attitude is the adoption of the “plain language,” namely the use of thou instead of you, and that of “plain dress.” (161) 36 Frederick Tolles, “’Of the Best Sort, but Plain:’ The Quaker Aesthetic,” American Quarterly Vol. 11 No. 4 (Winter, 1959): 484-502; Charles E. Fager, “The Quaker Testimony of Simplicity” The Quaker Religious Thought, Vol. 14 No. 1 (Summer, 1972): 2-30; Brinton, Friends for 350 Years, 163-174; Catherine C. Lavoie, “Reunified, Rebuilt, Enlarged, or Rehabilitated: Deciphering Friends’ Complex Attitudes toward Their Meeting Houses,” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum Vol. 19 No. 2, (Fall, 2012): 20-52. 37 Brinton, Friends for 350 Years, 165. 143

would have wanted. (As the dress code has relaxed over centuries, today there is no visible difference between Quakers and non-Quakers.)

Quaker Meetinghouses. Quaker meetinghouses are not sacred, transcendent spaces, but their role is central to keeping alive genealogies, as well as personal and collective histories (Figure 2.4.) The common perception is that their design does not distinguish itself from domestic architecture. Although “there are no inherently sacred objects or spaces,” once a proper spiritual understanding is achieved through the Inner Light, the distinction between the sacred and the secular disappears and “all aspects of life are encompassed by the sacred.”38 So rather than a secularization of sacred spaces, all spaces, profane and sacred, are, in fact, elevated to a spiritual level.

A story of transgression that has occurred in the early 1690s and has been transmitted into the twentieth century, testifies for the pressures and sometimes inconsistencies at work in Quaker practices. The Quaker Robert Turner claimed that he had a testimony against ministers’ galleries, so he entered a meetinghouse and demolished that elevated gallery, later showing his satisfaction in front of his fellows Friends.39 This account shows a certain tension between physical and spiritual matters, a tension derived from the privileged position that the elevated gallery would have offered to certain members of the community, a situation at odds with the Quaker ideals of equality. Despite general assumptions, there is historic evidence showing that during service in the meetinghouse, certain agendas were pursued and different members of the community were assigned specific roles based not only on their religious experience, but also on their race, gender, age and class.40

Friends’ attitude toward their worship spaces reflects the paradox inherent in the Quaker doctrine: on the one hand, meetinghouses are not regarded as spiritual artifacts, but on the other hand, they are maintained, reused and rebuilt as a way of preserving the integrity and the

38 Garfinkel, “Letting in “the World:” (Re)interpretive Tensions in the Quaker Meeting House,” 78. 39 Garfinkel, “Letting in “the World:” (Re)interpretive Tensions in the Quaker Meeting House,” 78. 40 Garfinkel, “Letting in “the World:” (Re)interpretive Tensions in the Quaker Meeting House,” 83-84. 144

continuity of the community.41 Clever ways of recycling and re-purposing building parts and materials from meeting houses that are no longer in use reflect concerns for resources and economy of means as aspects of simplicity, but also reinforce ideas about continuity, genealogy and legacy.42

When possible, the old meetinghouse was and is saved in its entirety and adapted for another use such as a school, stable, shed, or even a residence. When new construction becomes unavoidable, materials from the old structure are generally incorporated into the design or sold and the funds applied to the cost of the building campaign.43

Historian Susan Garfinkel has identified a series of polarized concepts and attitudes at work within the Quaker meeting houses such as nurture/nature, private/public, inside/outside, plain/worldly, equality/hierarchy, etc.44 Friends’ worship spaces act as contested spaces where tensions are performed and re-enacted in every meeting: between silence and speaking, action and meditation, between the individual revelation through Inner Light and its communal understanding through the larger group, between saving material artifacts as depositories of memories and discarding the same objects as spiritually irrelevant.

Quaker Art. Quaker artistic tradition is built upon the tension between words and images. The silent worship requires a patient waiting, which is sometimes followed by a message heard, recognized, understood, verbalized, and then communicated to the community. Words as signs carry the message of revelation. The act of recognizing them as signs is the act of receiving and understanding the divine message. As abstract entities, disembodied from the material world, words are discreet, but powerful presences in the Quaker universe.

41 Lavoie, “Reunified, Rebuilt, Enlarged, or Rehabilitated: Deciphering Friends’ Complex Attitudes toward Their Meeting Houses,” 21. 42 Lavoie, “Reunified, Rebuilt, Enlarged, or Rehabilitated: Deciphering Friends’ Complex Attitudes toward Their Meeting Houses,” 20-52. 43 Lavoie, “Reunified, Rebuilt, Enlarged, or Rehabilitated: Deciphering Friends’ Complex Attitudes toward Their Meeting Houses,” 25. 44 These “opposing modes and roles” are: “nurture / nature. Private / public, inside / outside, Inner Light / outward world, Truth / “the World,” plain / worldly, silence / speaking, personal inspiration / communal understanding, equality / hierarchy, member / minister, member /attender, male / female, artisan / businessman, businessman / politician, country / city.” (Garfinkel, “Letting in “the World:” (Re)interpretive Tensions in the Quaker Meeting House,” 86). 145

One of the core ideas in Venturi’s theory and practice emphasizes the display of words on buildings (signs, names or numbers) as an unmediated and explicit way to communicate a message. The decorated shed is essentially a generic structure with a sign attached to it, stating unequivocally its purpose and intent. (Projects such as the Guild House (Figure 2.5.), Grand’s Restaurant (Figure 2.6.), National Football Hall of Fame (Figure 2.7.) are only a few examples of his early use of explicit signs where the signs were, in fact, not only placed on buildings, but carefully designed in the office through numerous iterations. “I am a monument” will later summarize this position.) This attitude might appear inconsistent with Venturi’s plea for ambiguity and richness of messages. While he has attributed the use of signs and icons to his own reading of New Criticism and Pop Art, the Quaker material culture offers cues for situating his position within a broader genealogy. Historic evidence and works of art in particular, show that a Quaker perspective accommodates and embraces seemingly contradictory approaches and that signs and icons are at the core of Quaker’s approach to art and spirituality.

In a commentary on Venturi’s work, architectural critic Inga Saffron noted an intriguing affinity between Venturi and Scott Brown’s Benjamin Franklin House in Philadelphia (Figure 2.8.) and the work of the early Quaker artist Edward Hicks. She remarked that “the steel Ghost House, the colonial fence posts, the arbor and the spreading mulberry tree” evoked Edward Hicks’ Peaceable Kingdom paintings.45

Visual arts have been a contentious topic in Quaker culture. Raising suspicion, mainstream visual arts were disregarded as representations of life threatening life itself.46 Their acceptance has been gradually introduced in the first half of the nineteenth century with Edward Hicks’ allegorical paintings. A Quaker preacher, minister and occasional poet, he was trained as a professional sign and carriage painter. Despite Friends’ skepticism toward images, around 1825 he began a series of easel paintings known as the Peaceable Kingdoms where he elaborated on Isaiah’s prophecy of universal peace and where words play a central role (Figure 2.9.).47 The recurrent motif of the series is the allegory of concord and harmony among all creatures on earth,

45 Inga Saffron, “Changing Skyline: An Elegant Redesign for Ben Franklin – and Venturi,” Accessed August 6, 2014, http://articles.philly.com/2013-08-26/news/41446205_1_denise-scott-brown-robert-venturi-benjamin- franklin-museum. 46 Brinton, Friends for 350 Years, 166. 47,John W. McCoubrey, “Three Paintings by Edward Hicks,” Yale Art Gallery Bulletin Vol. 25 No. 2 (Oct., 1959): 17. 146

an allegory represented by the serene co-habitation of the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and the kid, the calf and the young lion.48

Drawing on the practice of sign painting, Hicks used words to reinforce the message of the images. In The Peaceable Kingdom of the Branch (painted between 1825 and 1830), for instance, Hicks inscribed on the margins of the painting the sixth verse of Isaiah’s prophecy: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them” (Figure 2.10.). Words and images rely upon each other to construct and communicate meaning. Paradoxically, the words explain the allegory, thus reinforcing the message of the images and ensuring that their meaning is clear and unambiguous. Situated outside the pictorial space, the words construct the framework of the image both as a physical edge, and, metaphorically, as a clarification.

Six of Hicks’ Peaceable Kingdoms show a group of (mostly) men and women in Quaker plain dress holding a long streamer.49 These allegories attempted to depict Quakers’ role in the antislavery movement of the nineteenth century, but also a larger idea about Christianity and human freedom.50 Thus, they had both a local and a universal meaning. In one of them, known as Peaceable Kingdoms with Quakers Bearing Banners (Figure 2.11.), the banner reads: “Mind the light within. It is glad tidings of great joy. Peace on earth and good will to all men everywhere.” The thirteen white figures projected in the background against the sky are Christ and the apostles and the banner represents Christian freedom.51 As it descends from time through space, the streamer reaches down into present world. The words occupy the space and, wrapped around the crowd, they carry the divine message as they are floating above the people from whom they remain detached.

The paradox of Hicks’ paintings is that they are simultaneously allegorical images and literal texts. Drawing on his formation as a sign painter, Hicks was literally advertising his work, but at the same time was addressing a community with which he shared a common

48 The sixth verse of Isaiah’s prophecy” “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf, and the young lion, and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.” (McCoubrey, “Three Paintings by Edward Hicks,” 17) 49 Frederick. B. Tolles, “The Primitive Painter as Poet,” Bulletin of Friends Historical Association Vol. 50 No. 1 (Spring, 1961): 23. 50 Ibid., 27. 51 Ibid., 27. 147

understanding of his text.52 The act of explaining the images to ensure the clarity of content is essential within a group whose code of practices and beliefs is based on truthfulness and honesty. In his work, Venturi has relied on the shared understanding of a message through words displayed on billboard-like surfaces that wrap around the architectural body (such as Grand’s restaurant (Figure 2.6.) or Guild House (Figure 2.5)).

The practice of visualizing words and numbers is present not only in Quaker paintings, but also in their built structures. Letters were inscribed on the walls of the nineteenth century domestic architecture of upper-class Quakers in the Delaware Valley. The owners set into the brickwork their family names, initials and construction years as a sign of “wealth …, authority and monumentality.”53 They emphasized the status quo and also constructed a historical and spatial genealogy. Architecture displayed and memorialized family and community, past and present, world and faith.

The obvious paradox that emerges from this reading is the reconciliation of worldliness with Quaker life. The answer lies in in part in our understanding that the issue for early eighteenth-c Quakers was not so much one of living in the world but one of how people properly lived in the world.54

Although using a plain language, the Quakers pay special attention to words, their meanings and their etymologies. For instance, because most of the names for months and for the days of the week had pagan origins, early Quakers decided to use numbers instead. Thus, they would say that January 15th was First Month 15th Day without mentioning the day of the week unless it was important. Some Quakers still use this system and Quaker Sunday School is called First Day School.55

52 Bernard L. Herman, “Introduction” to “Quakers as Producers,” in Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption, eds. Emma Jones Lapsansky; Anne A. Verplanck (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 150. 53 Bernard L. Herman, “Eighteenth-Century Quaker Houses in the Delaware Valley and the Aesthetics of Practice,” in Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption, eds. Emma Jones Lapsansky; Anne A. Verplanck (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 201. 54 Ibid., 204. 55 See, for instance, https://www.fgcquaker.org/cloud/new-haven-friends-meeting/announcements/first-day-school- program Accessed on February 5, 2018. 148

While Quaker tradition appears to resist representation, it addresses a different dimension of the artwork. It engages, in fact, with art forms that operate in a two-dimensional space and tend to flatten the three-dimensional world. During the first couple of centuries after the foundation of the Society of Friends, the Quakers have disregarded mainstream visual arts perceived as images of life threatening to take over life itself.56 They appropriated, instead, modes of representation consistent with their doctrine. In nineteenth century Philadelphia, the Quakers privileged silhouettes over traditional oil paintings (Figure 2.12).57 A particular form of portraiture, silhouettes were either drawn freehand or traced directly from the outline of a head or a shadow with a physiognotrace (an instrument designed to trace a person’s physiognomy) (Figure 2.13.).58

Made popular in the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century through the work of the Swiss theologian and philosopher Johann Kaspar Lavater, physiognomy started from the premise that people’s facial traits reflect their character.59 It was precisely the emphasis on character as the most important feature of an individual that appealed to the Quaker soul, which was searching for the essence of being and was willing to leave aside unnecessary details. From a Quaker perspective, silhouettes could be construed as projections of the soul made visible through the Inner Light that acts as the source of light casting shadows. The invisible (the soul) thus turns visible through an ephemeral projection (the silhouette), itself a fleeting shadow.

The technique of making silhouettes did not require extensive resources. Made of paper, the hollow-cut silhouettes were placed on a black or blue piece of fabric. By folding the piece of paper, one could create multiple silhouettes and that made their production fairly easy and inexpensive. Philadelphia-area based Quakers came to prefer this form of portraiture because it conveyed the essence of the sitter’s character without superfluous adornments. At the same time, it was a modest and affordable form of graphic representation. Silhouettes fitted the Quaker

56 Brinton, Friends for 350 Years, 166. 57 Anne Verplanck, “The Silhouette and Quaker Identity in Early National Philadelphia,” Winterthur Portfolio Vol. 43 No. 1 (Spring, 2009): 41-78. 58 Ibid., 52. 59 Ibid, 52. 149

conceptions about material life: plain, simple, and economical.60 Collected in albums, they were bringing together not only members of the same family, but also friends, ancestors, and figures from the past (Figure 2.14). The cut-outs could be exchanged, mailed, and offered as gifts. The activity of assembling them in albums required the participation of the immediate or extended family and this act of sharing reinforced kinship and identity. At a larger scale, the albums also traced the lineage and genealogy of the Quakers, thus legitimating their position in history.61

The silhouettes were simultaneously figurative and abstract, specific and universal: as they outlined the character of the sitters, the profiles gave them an identity, but also stripped off the particular details that usually make the difference between an individual and a generic figure. Contemporary Philadelphia still engages the passer by with the old tradition of silhouettes offering clues through public art pieces surreptitiously displayed on street corners. An art piece located on the street corner makes reference to a particular form of public space claimed by erstwhile Friends as a sign of their marginal condition.62

Just as Venturi only obliquely referenced the presence of the Society of Friends in his life, the influence of silhouettes on his work is speculative. Venturi and Scott Brown’s design for the Knoll chairs, for instance, recalls the flatness of Quaker cut-out silhouettes and their play between universality and specificity (Figure 2.15.). As the story goes, a tablecloth belonging to one of the firm’s employee’s grandmother inspired the pattern of the Queen Anne chair (Figure 2.16.). The chair thus carries both specific and universal traits: while it references the past of a particular person, it also has characteristics that allow a larger group of people to recognize it and identify themselves with its message. In a photograph of Venturi and Scott Brown posing with two of the Knoll chairs, Denise is wearing a dress of the same pattern as the Queen Anne chair next to her. An ironic statement about the nature of the surface (also, perhaps an ironic statement about two queens, Anne and Denise), the fabric of the dress and the fabric of the chair become autonomous and interchangeable. What matter is not the quality of the fabric, its texture, thickness or materiality, but its mere appearance. Another example is the exterior rendering of

60 Ibid, 53-54. 61 Verplanck, “The Silhouette and Quaker Identity in Early National Philadelphia.” 62 An active Quaker website called Street Corner Society “refers to a common space where the historical experience of Friends and other groups connects with issues of our day, and where we as modern-day Friends and fellow- travelers may discover ourselves more clearly in a broader, historical context.” http://www.strecorsoc.org/about.html Accessed on march 16, 2014. 150

the billdingboard (the entry for the National Football Hall of Fame competition), where Venturi used an image of football players silhouettes (Figure 2.17.). They recalled a 1947 Princeton – Pennsylvania game. Bringing together Princeton (his alma mater) and the University of Pennsylvania (the school where he was teaching at the time), the rendering evoked both a very personal story and a more universal one.63

In response to a competition entry of the Venturi – Scott Brown partnership, Philip Johnson qualified their work as “ugly and ordinary.” The two have appropriated these attributes and turned them into a personal design manifesto. This is, perhaps, more than a satire against the elitism of modern architecture or a form of protest against mainstream movements. The Quaker value system recognizes an architecture in the world, but not of it that at the same fits within, and distinguishes itself from its surroundings, that belongs to a vernacular tradition while manifesting its own identity. From this perspective, flatness appears both as a material quality of the objects, but also as an attribute of the context in which the differences between various elements are gradually disappearing.

“Plain and Fancy.” In 1973, the firm of Venturi, Scott Brown and Rauch built the extension of the Allen Art Museum at Oberlin College, Ohio (Figure 2.18.). A few of years later, Venturi published two articles about this project, both of them bearing the same title: “Plain and Fancy Architecture by Cass Gilbert at Oberlin.” (The content was later republished in A View from the Campidoglio.64) The title provides a clue to understanding the relation between Quaker simplicity, on the one hand, and Mannerist and Baroque influences in Venturi’s work, on the other. In the context of Quaker Philadelphia, the oxymoron plain and fancy has a history that goes beyond a humorous pun.

The production ‘Plain and Fancy’ premiered on Broadway in 1955. Deemed the “best musical comedy of the year” in a New Yorker ad from 1956, the play was written by Joseph Stein

63 In a 1947 football game between the Penn Quakers and the Princeton Tigers, the formers won by 26-7. 64 Robert Venturi, “Plain and Fancy Architecture by Cass Gilbert at Oberlin,” Apollo Vol. 130 No. 168 (February, 1976): 86-89; Robert Venturi, “Plain and Fancy Architecture by Cass Gilbert at Oberlin,” Allen Memorial Bulletin Vol. 34 No. 2 (1976-1977): 83-104; Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, A View from the Campidoglio: Selected Essays 1953-1984 (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1984). 151

(who had also authored the successful Fiddler on the Roof) and provided one of the first depictions of an Amish community in American pop culture. The stage set included a barn and thus displayed one of the traditional communal activities in Amish communities. Stein’s inspiration in writing the script came from an Amish community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Although the Quakers and the Amish are unrelated as religious denominations and have different sets of beliefs, they share certain similarities: they are both pacifists, oppose war and violence, and promote simplicity of lifestyle, material culture, and manners. Descending from the sixteenth century Swiss Anabaptists, the Amish still reject the comforts of modern life (such as electricity, deemed to encourage competition for material goods) and to this day distinguish themselves through particular garbs. To a layperson, however, the Quakers and the Amish might appear similar, and therefore in the popular culture the differences between the two groups are sometimes blurred. The phrase plain and fancy came to be associated with both Amish and Quaker values, referring especially to aspects of their material culture.

The attributes plain and fancy cover a wide range of artifacts, from food to furniture and decorative arts, as shown in a few examples drawn from popular culture. Dating from 1959 and supplied by an Amish farm, a contemporary restaurant from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania capitalizes on these attributes as the ‘Plain and fancy farm.’65 In a 1963 article titled “Philadelphia Plain and Fancy,” the author explained that the city was the result of the “conscience of Quakers (the Plain) and tastes of their rich Episcopalian descendants (the Fancy).”66 A family business opened in 1968 in Richland, Pennsylvania that still manufactures furniture calls itself “Plain and fancy cabinetry.”67 David Sox’s 2000 book Quakers and the Arts, “Plain and Fancy:” An Anglo-American Perspective brought together writers, artists, musicians and other intellectuals all members of the Society of Friends.68 “Plain or Fancy: Restraint and Exuberance in the Decorative Arts,” a show organized in 2013 at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City went beyond the assumption that Modernism singlehandedly banned ornament,

65 http://www.plainandfancyfarm.com/ Accessed on July 27, 2014. 66 Nathaniel Burt, “Philadelphia Plain and Fancy,” Horizon Vol. V Issue 6 (1963): 5. 67 Accessed July 27, 2014, http://plainfancycabinetry.com/. 68 Kristin U Fedder, “Quakers and the Arts, ‘Plain and Fancy:’ An Anglo-American Perspective by David Sox,” Quaker History Vol. 91 No. 1 (Spring, 2002): 70. 152

and showcased works of sculpture and decorative arts that followed the eponymous theme from the Renaissance to the twentieth century.69

But what exactly is the view on plainness and simplicity in Quaker doctrine?

Conventional wisdom describes the Quaker way of life as plain or simple. The approach to plainness and simplicity, however, has not been consistent through the ages but rather has changed over time depending upon historic and social conditions, as well as subsequent readings of these circumstances.70 Over the past one hundred and fifty years in particular, different aspects of the Quaker lifestyle have been trying to reconcile the aspiration toward plainness or simplicity with the changing forms of the exterior world. Defined as “the absence of superfluity,” simplicity was originally an outward expression manifested in dress, speech, and absence of distractions such as art and music, but eventually became a spiritual quality rather than a material attribute.71 In time, Friends began to accept certain forms of art as adequate expressions of their love of God.72

From its very beginning, the Quaker way of life denounced indulgence in any form of excess or luxury, and promoted a sober style. The testimony of simplicity began as a form of resistance to other religious traditions that preferred the pleasures of the senses to spiritual joys.73 A shift from sober to plain occurred in the last decades of the seventeenth century when meetings began to reference plainness.74 The plain style did not belong exclusively to the Quakers – it was a mark of general Protestant aesthetics, and a form of protest against Baroque (associated with Counter-reformation) and, later, Rococo.75

For the next two hundred years, the goal of the plain style in speech, dress, architecture, and furniture was to distinguish the Quakers from the non-Quakers, and keep the Friends separated from the world. It was only at the turn of the twentieth century that the attitude toward

69 Accessed July 27, 2014, http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2013/plain-or-fancy. 70 J. William Frost, “From Plainness to Simplicity: Changing Quaker Ideals for Material Culture,” Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption, eds. Emma Jones Lapsansky; Anne A. Verplanck (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 71 Elise Boulding, Friends Testimonies in the Home. Publication of the Religious Education Committee, Friends General Conference (1953): 25. 72 Boulding, Friends Testimonies in the Home, 26. 73 Tolles, Quakers and the Atlantic Culture, 73. 74 Frost, “From Plainness to Simplicity: Changing Quaker Ideals for Material Culture,” 23. 75 Tolles, Quakers and the Atlantic Culture, 77-78. 153

plainness has started to change. Quaker historian and theologian Rufus Jones has proposed that plainness was, in fact, devaluing nature, and that Friends had to move beyond the paradigm of the plain style in order to be able to value the presence of God in fine arts and music. He replaced plainness with simplicity and suggested that the latter was a “quality of the soul,” “a joyous companionship to God.”76

First adopted in 1955, Faith and Practice is one of the many publications issued by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Quakers and includes “advices on procedures within the faith, membership, current practice for conducting meeting business and numerous quotations from Friends on belief, worship, concerns, leadings, and testimonies.”77 By 1961, the book defined simplicity as an attitude that did not require standardization or uniformity and emphasized, instead, simplicity as a moral and ethical stance. It preserved some earlier accounts related to the removal of “encumbering details” and unnecessary luxuries, but the issues at stake were truth, modesty, and sincerity. The book described simplicity as the outward manifestation of an inner commitment to Truth and to the system of values shared by the Society of Friends.

Simplicity is closely akin to sincerity – a genuineness of life and speech in which there is no place for sham or artificiality. The care given by early Friends to avoid flattering titles and phrases and to aim for rectitude of speech undoubtedly has done much to turn attention to honesty in the spoken and the written word. Care is needed to avoid and discourage the insincerity and extravagance that are prevalent in the social world. We need also to speak the simple truth, in love, when occasion requires it.78

Since 1997, in Faith & Practice simplicity has been associated with stewardship; the latter is the “coming together” of Friends’ major testimonies and expresses one of the main virtues of the Quaker way of being in the world and within the family.79 Simplicity is defined as “one of the traditional Quaker testimonies that is closely associated with integrity, equality, and stewardship. Essentially, to limit the material circumstances of one’s life in a way that enables

76 Frost, “From Plainness to Simplicity: Changing Quaker Ideals for Material Culture,” 37. 77 Accessed February 16, 2017http://www.pym.org/faith-and-practice/. 78 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Faith and Practice (1961), 22-24 quoted in Charles E. Fager, “The Quaker Testimony of Simplicity,” Quaker Religious Thought 14, 1 (Summer 1972): 4-5. 79 Accessed February 15, 2014http://www.pym.org/faith-and-practice/application-of-friends-testimonies/living-in- the-world/. 154

one to follow divine leadings.”80 Concepts such as “right sharing” or “walking gently on the Earth,” further reinforce the emphasis on the ethical dimension of simplicity.81

Most of Quaker writings have focused on the study of the good and the truthful somewhat to the detriment of the beautiful. However, the ascetic Quaker aesthetics has appealed to modern tastes and the modern mantra Less is more. Quaker aesthetics, it has been argued, “reflected an ideal of functional simplicity peculiarly congenial to modern sensibilities.”82

Plainness and simplicity, however, operate within the paradox specific to Quaker thought, which is rooted in contradictory values: equality and difference, intellectualism and anti- intellectualism, emphasis on excellence and focus on humbleness, appreciation for high-quality craftsmanship and rejection of luxury and ostentation.83 In this context, seventeenth century meeting houses, for instance, without stained glass windows, statues, religious garments or ordained ministers, appeared not plain and simple, but rather eccentric in comparison with current standards.84 Designed to be not so much plain, but different from the Anglican ecclesiastical architecture, the Quaker meeting house reinforced an important paradox: Quaker aesthetics “can only work through a process of outward show that places an emphasis on distinctiveness.”85 Friends meeting houses from the eighteenth century in the Delaware Valley, for example, were based on the same tenet of simplicity and followed similar principles: on the one hand, they rejected ecclesiastic models and ornamentation, but on the other hand, they borrowed from vernacular domestic architecture in terms of construction techniques, use of indigenous materials, and human scale.86 Historic evidence shows that simplicity, however, does

80 Accessed February 15, 2014 http://www.pym.org/faith-and-practice/glossary/. 81 Frost, “From Plainness to Simplicity: Changing Quaker Ideals for Material Culture,” 39. 82 Tolles, Quakers and the Atlantic Culture, 76. 83 Emma Jones Lapsansky, “Past Plainness to Present Simplicity: A Search for Quaker Identity,” in Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption, eds. Emma Lapsansky; Jones; Anne A. Verplanck (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 3. 84 Lapsansky, “Past Plainness to Present Simplicity: A Search for Quaker Identity,” 2. 85 Herman, “Introduction” to “Quakers as Producers,” 150. 86 Catherine C. Lavoie, “Quaker Beliefs and Practices and the Eighteenth-Century Development of the Friends Meeting House in the Delaware Valley,” in Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption, eds. Emma Lapsansky; Jones; Anne A. Verplanck (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 157-171. 155

not appear as a pre-established design goal for the architecture of meeting houses until the twentieth century.87

Simplicity acts not only as a form of distinctiveness, but also as one of recognition that enables members of the same community to identify each other through their exterior appearance, their built structures, and their artifacts. A more nuanced attitude toward simplicity and material artifacts operates the distinction between foreground and background: situating objects in the foreground of someone’s life indicates a vain desire to possess the objects for themselves, whereas placing them in the background shows how they can construct the context for a rich spiritual life.88

Recent scholarship proposes that Quaker beliefs about plainness and material world are rather fluid and encompass a variety of expressions.89 For instance, the assumption that Quaker domestic architecture is by default a plain one, is a rather modern idea, which is often contradicted by historic evidence.90 Quaker ideas about decoration might have been different from mainstream ones, but this does not mean they were entirely missing. The exterior of eighteenth century Quaker houses was treated in decorative brickwork onto which the owners would inscribe the initials of their names, as well as construction dates. These strategies communicate both a desire to display the sense of belonging to a community, and an aspiration to convey social status and certain living standards.91 The tension between private and public, between the Inner Light and its outward manifestations influences Quakers’ approach to material artifacts. Within this particular mindset, buildings are ephemeral, but they also communicate a certain sense of historical lineage.

From this perspective, it is relevant to examine Venturi’s practice of writing names and dates on the walls of his buildings. From his early projects such as the Frug House, Grand’s

87 Catherine C. Lavoie, “Quaker Beliefs and Practices and the Eighteenth-Century Development of the Friends Meeting House in the Delaware Valley,” 171-172. 88 Boulding, Friends Testimonies in the Home, 26. 89 Susan Garfinkel, “Quakers and High Chests: The Plainness Problem Reconsidered,” in Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption, eds. Emma Lapsansky; Jones; Anne A. Verplanck (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 50-51. 90 Bernard L. Herman, “Eighteenth-Century Quaker Houses in the Delaware Valley and the Aesthetics of Practice,” in in Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption, eds. Emma Lapsansky; Jones; Anne A. Verplanck (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 189-190. 91 Bernard L. Herman, “Eighteenth-Century Quaker Houses in the Delaware Valley and the Aesthetics of Practice,” 199-208. 156

Restaurant, the Guild House or the National Football Hall of Fame, to the later works of the Venturi and Scott Brown team labeled as the decorated shed, the display of inscriptions has been largely situated within the artistic trends of visualizing words specific to the 1960s and 1970s. However, Venturi’s early upbringing and exposure to Quaker doctrine and aesthetics suggest that this iconology signals a genealogy different from mid-century visual arts. The theory of architecture as shelter with applied signs that Venturi and Scott Brown will elaborate in the 1970s may be understood not only as the outcome of their interest in the commercial vernacular, but also as a perhaps indirect (and never acknowledged) nod to Quaker culture. Inscriptions communicate explicit and unambiguous messages, but they also appeal to basic human needs: belonging to a community and being able to recognize the signs of its material culture gives individuals a sense of continuity and stability that modernity has radically altered. Venturi’s critique of modern architecture is indirectly a critique of modern alienation and displacement. His own biography shows a deep concern with finding personal and professional origins: while traveling the world, he never left his native Philadelphia and has always attempted to intertwine various cultural threads, from personal and architectural genealogies rooted in Italian culture, to American vernacular and Pop Culture.

Venturi’s approach to an architecture that is flat, and at the same time complex, a part of its context, yet apart from it, simple in nature, but convoluted in form, builds upon the notion of paradox central to the Quaker system of thought. Manifested in the spirituality of the Friends, as well as in their material culture, the paradox of being ‘in the world, but not of it’ finds its expression in Venturi’s architecture, which also aims to accomplish two of the important tenets of Quakerism: recognizing the signs, and telling the Truth. If according to Quaker doctrine, the former is a mystical event experienced not as a sudden exposure, but rather as a “gradual and progressive awareness,”92 in Venturi’s architecture the act of recognizing the signs is often a literal process of identifying the function and genealogy of a certain building. A form of simplicity, genuineness and sincerity, telling the Truth is a moral and spiritual belief that Venturi aims to translate into an architectural principle: once the truth – spiritual or architectural – is

92 Tolles, Quakers and the Atlantic Culture, 112. 157

exposed, it does not require any further explanations or justifications and accomplishes its mission through its inner power.

2.2. Boredom and midcentury billboards

After having looked at plainness and simplicity in Quaker aesthetics, this section examines the flatness of billboards and boredom in midcentury architecture. Flatness refers both to the flatness of surfaces and to the flatness of meaning.

Having both spatial and temporal dimensions, billboards are inherently paradoxical objects. Generally assumed to have two dimensions, technically speaking billboards are not flat: a three-dimensional structure supports the advertising surfaces and, as we will see later in this chapter, different advertising strategies have often explored this third dimension. However, when billboards are perceived in a split second in urban contexts or on the highway, from the speeding car, the advertising surface itself appears, indeed, flat, transient and ephemeral. While their goal is to arrest viewers’ attention, billboards also act as entertainment devices that create disruption, distraction, and amusement. Billboards exist in an a-temporal world: neither here, nor there, they collapse past, present, and future in an instantaneous perception.

The first consequence of appropriating the aesthetics of billboards in architecture is what Venturi and Scott Brown coined as the decorated shed.93 In opposition to the duck (which designates an architectural object that directly expresses its function), the decorated shed is a plain box acting as a support for signs or billboards that spell out its function and purpose.

Another consequence, however, is that the use of billboard as a conceptual tool indicates a shift toward designing an architecture of entertainment and endless change, which is perceived mostly frontally, as a flat surface, rather than a spatial experience. The broad range of connotative and denotative meanings of the word flat points to shallow planes and surfaces that lack depth, but also to “prosaic, dull, uninteresting, lifeless, monotonous, insipid” situations,

93 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1977), 87-89. 158

objects, and persons.94 The implications of appropriating the flatness of billboards in architecture are twofold: on the one hand, it offers the promise of easy changes and distraction, and, on the other hand, puts forward a mode of perception that privileges elevations and frontal perception. Both consequences are eventually conducive to formal and experiential boredom. Exposed to superficial surfaces, both in a literal and figurative sense, people turn from inhabitants of architecture into passive spectators.

Brief excursus in the history and typology of billboards. According to an old story, the first known billboard was a message on a papyrus from 146 BC, which advertised a reward for a runaway slave in the ancient city of Thebes.95 One of the earliest textbooks on outdoor advertising even argued that the Rosetta stone, which was originally placed on the wall of a temple, presented an early form of outdoor advertising: the notice in several languages was supposedly intended to communicate the same message to several types of readers.96

Different forms of sharing public notices with a larger audience have existed long before advertisement and product placing have been formalized through the billboard industry. Before the late 1700s in Europe, individuals designated as billposters had the role of making public various announcements and pieces of information. The early beginnings of billboards are associated with the entertainment field: theaters and circuses used posters to promote their shows and many billposting companies grew out of theater and opera houses.97 The term billboard pass, for instance, referred to “a free theatre ticket issued to tradespeople who allowed advertisments to be displayed on their premises.”98 At the beginning of the 19th century, the walls of public buildings in North American cities, as well as telegraph poles, rocks, trees, railway tracks pillars, fences, and sometimes even carcasses of dead animals, provided unregulated spaces for advertising. Plastered with bills, posters, banners and streamers, these spaces constituted the first

94 Oxford English Dictionary. 95 http://www.madehow.com/Volume-5/Billboard.html; David Bernstein, Advertising Outdoors: Watch This Space (London: Phaidon Press, 2006), 12 (based on a papyrus on display at Louvre); Sally Henderson and Robert Landau, Billboard Art (London: Angus & Robertson), 9. 96 Hugh E. Agnew, Outdoor Advertising (New York: Garland, 1985), 26. 97 Catherine Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape (New York: Routledge, 2004), 9-18. 98 Oxford English Dictionary. 159

informal modes of publicity way before the advent and proliferation of the automobile culture offered the vast spaces of highways for spreading promotional messages.99

As billposting became an industry, a major step forward was the idea of leasing designated spaces and constructing special structures for advertising.100 The first recorded structure leased with this purpose was the board fence surrounding the construction site of the New York City Post Office in 1869, hence the alleged origin of the term billboard.101 In their early stages, billboards were primarily text-based; in time, the prevalence of text in nineteenth century billboards gave way to the image-based billboards of the twentieth century.102 The invention of lithography in 1796 made it easier and more affordable to print and multiply text and image and thus contributed to turning poster making into an art form.103

Billboard is a generic term that commonly refers to outdoor advertising elements. One of the earliest advertising manuals, Hugh E. Agnew’s Outdoor Advertising from 1938, classified billboards into posters, painted bulletins and electric spectaculars.104 Posters were applied on a standard steel structure (called poster panel) and had standardized dimensions: 24-sheet and 3- sheet. Bulletins – or what we generally call billboards – had a standard structural design and were placed in urban locations on roofs and walls, as well as on highways and railways, outside cities and in suburban setting. Electric spectaculars took full advantage of the availability of electricity, and occupied places in urban settings, on rooftops or walls, on specially constructed steel towers, at points of intense traffic; their size was determined by view-points, visibility and space availability.105 Agnew made the distinction between outdoor billboards and commercial signs, where the latter generally identify a business, its products or its services at the point of

99 Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape, 9-34. 100 Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape, 18. 101 Ibid., 18-19; Agnew, Outdoor Advertising, 29. 102 Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape, 66. 103Agnew, Outdoor Advertising, 26-27. A German invention, lithography was invented in 1796 or 1798 by Aloys Senefelder and consisted of a process of printing from a smooth, flat-topped stone which permitted the reproduction of images at an affordable cost for advertisers. (Agnew, Outdoor Advertising, 26-27) 104 Agnew, Outdoor Advertising, 4. 105 Agnew, Outdoor Advertising, 8. Etymologically, bulletin derives from the French boulette, diminutive of boule (ball) and contains the notion of short, concise notes; a bullet has the same condensed and concentrated effect. The electric spectacular derives from spectacle – a display to be looked at (Latin spectare, to look), “a person or thing exhibited to, or set before, the public gaze as an object either (a) of curiosity or contempt, or (b) of marvel or admiration.” (Oxford English Dictionary) 160

manufacture, distribution or sale.106 He explained that the main difference between the two is that “signs are manufactured and sold outright for installation and maintenance by a sign contractor on premises not owned, leased or controlled by the contractor or his agent.”107

Although perceived as flat, billboards are, in fact, three-dimensional and typically consist of steel structures that carry the weight of the advertising panels (Figure 2.19.). A basic metal structure, billboards borrow from architectural construction techniques, particularly those utilized in high-rise buildings. Simple, logical and efficient, the structure of the billboard serves its purpose. As a physical object, it can sometimes change location, be moved and repositioned. It bears different temporary advertising panels that are changed based on needs and contractual obligations. Discarded once no longer needed, advertising panels are replaced with new ones and the billboard offers a clean slate for another company to promote its products.

Outdoor billboards consist of a three-dimensional support structure and the actual advertisement that comes in various forms and media. Currently, the billboard structure typically comprises a steel monopole, a board and a PVC canvas applied onto it. Offering only one side to the motorists on the highway, billboards have a front and a back, but sometimes explore a depth and a thickness that is not immediately apparent in the way we perceive them. The desire to transgress these two-dimensional limitations has found different expressions throughout the years: three-dimensional elements, figures popping out from the flat screen creating the illusion of motion and movement, or even the viewer’s (limited) control over the image (Figure 2.20.).108

This “third dimension” often offers opportunities for larger, if inadvertent, critiques of consumerist culture. An episode from the popular midcentury TV sitcom Leave it to Beaver aired on May 6, 1961 follows the main character, the seven-year old Beaver, as he is trying to look inside a three-dimensional billboard mug (Figure 2.21.). Intrigued by the savory (though fragrant-less) steam rising from the oversized cup, he is determined to find the magical, never- ending soup inside. Therefore, he eventually climbs inside only to find himself trapped in a

106 Agnew, Outdoor Advertising, 11. 107 Agnew, Outdoor Advertising, 9. 108 Passers-by can control the level of tanning of a woman wearing bikini in a bus-shelter billboard. The advertising company DDBrasil came up with an adjustable tanning display for Johnson and Johnson’s Sundown line of tanning products. Accessed February 6, 2018, http://creativity-online.com/work/sundown-interactive-tanning-display/6576 161

network of electric circuits. There is no magic soup and the cup, like the advertising message itself, is hollow (Figure 2.22.). Beaver’s disappointment is the so-familiar disenchantment shared by all the gullible victims of deceiving publicity. In an outdoor commercial for Instant Sanka Coffee featured a gigantic cup and the tiny silhouette of a woman bent over the rim while reaching inside with a ladle that almost touched the enticing surface of (the unseen) brown “liquid.”

One of Venturi’s early projects, the 1962 restoration of the Grand’s restaurant in Philadelphia, featured a gigantic cup hanging off the façade of the building (Figure 2.6.). Splitting in half the commercial sign announcing the name of the place, the cup drew attention to the wall dividing the two townhouses that, in the remodeling process, were turned into a single building. Featuring flashy blue and yellow neon lights, the cup was a clever nod to current attempts of exploring the third dimension of billboards and also one of Venturi’s first uses of the advertising language in architecture.

If in the 1960s a naïve Beaver had ben enticed by the sight of the steaming soup without any other sensorial experiences, more recent advertising strategies have attempted to question the boundary between reality and fantasy through engaging other senses in the perception of the advertising message. Part of a state campaign to promote milk, chocolate-chip-cookies scented strips were placed in bus shelters in San Francisco in 2006.109 In 2010, a scented billboard was installed in Moorseville, NC as an advertisement for the Bloom grocery chain. From the end of May until June 18, every day from 7am to 10am, and 4pm to 7pm, a billboard featuring a fork piercing a piece of beef meat emitted the smell of pepper and charcoal that was sensed as far as 15 feet away (Figure 2.23.). The mechanics of this performance worked through a high-powered fan located at the base of the billboard pole that was blowing air over cartridges filled with fragrance oil.110 Alluding to the impossibility of representing smell, and also playing with the convention of pictorial space, the billboard read: “Flavor is actual size.” It could have been also a nod to Ed Ruscha’s 1962 “Actual Size,” an oil-on-canvas painting depicting a can of Spam flying through space – an allusion to a period joke calling astronauts “Spam in a can” (Figure

109 http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/06/03/512824/a-whiff-of-grilled-steak-markets.html 110 http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/06/03/512824/a-whiff-of-grilled-steak-markets.html; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/03/steak-scented-billboard-p_n_599202.html 162

2.24.). As technological advancements will allow further developments, the nature of advertising and billboards will change. Since Harvard scientists have accomplished the first long-distance transmission of smell, from Paris to New York, via i-phone on June 18, 2014, it is only a matter of time before the senses of smell, touch, and perhaps even taste, will be engaged as more convincing tools in spreading the advertising message.

Imagining the third dimension of billboards, their thickness and depth has played an important role in their design as stage sets where life scenes are re-enacted, sometimes quite literally.111 Different cut-outs breaking through the billboard frames create the illusion of occupying the space.112 (Figure 2.25.). Protected by glass screens, interiors of kitchens, bedrooms, or living rooms display furniture sets, various sorts of domestic equipment and consumer goods.113 Billboards thus break the conventions of scale, as well as the dichotomy interior – exterior with the ultimate goal of blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, reality and imagination.

As the beginnings of billboard industry originated in the leisure industry, they have shared and continue to share similar strategies of display and entertainment: constructing a plot, building up viewer’s expectations, and dramatically revealing the final coup. As early as 1925 the heir of the Burma Vita company advertised their new brushless shaving cream by placing 6 10”X36” red-painted wooden signs spaced every 100 feet on Minnesota’s Highways 61 and 65, with rhymes like “Does your husband – misbehave – grunt and grumble – rant and rave – shoot the brute some – Burma-Shave.”114 Three-dimensional billboards provided stages for live performances, dramatic lightning constructed flamboyant decors, and streamlined design created an image of modernity and progress.115 Design and construction constraints have suggested new modes of communicating the advertising message. In the 1950s, the popular practice of breaking outside the surface of the billboard entered in conflict with the streamlined moldings running around the rim. Therefore, an entire cut-out of the product advertised was pegged off the surface

111 Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape, 134-146. For the 1932 season, “live models turn the pages of the giant book advertising Paramount Studio’s new releases,” at a “world premiere for the billboard.” (Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape, 140-141) 112 Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape, 136. 113 Ibid., 137-146. 114 Ibid., 77. 115 Ibid., 140-150. 163

of the billboard in order not to interfere with the molding.116 The overhanging pieces cast shadows onto the billboard playing with the ambiguity between flat surfaces and three- dimensional elements.

The advertising industry has offered new venues to visual artists who, in turn, have transformed the language and modes of expression of billboards. The middle decades of the twentieth century have provided fertile grounds for experimentation in art and as well as advertising and the intersection between the two fields were common. The Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s has generated a more abstract imagery in billboards.117 The show “The Responsive Eye,” on view at MoMA from February through April of 1965, was examining perceptual responses of the viewer exposed to illusions and optical devices.118 Ninety-nine artists from fifteen countries (including Josef Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Irwin, Frank Stella and Victor Vasarely among others) put on display tricks for the eye and the mind that quickly found their way into the advertising industry.119 Known as “Optical,” “Retinal,” “Cool,” or “Programmatic,” this art form unsettled the viewer and their conventional perception of the environment through a deliberate play with optical illusions. Furthermore, the unreliability of sensorial experience that questioned the boundaries of reality became an adequate strategy for billboard design and reinforced their transient, impermanent and elusive nature.

Ed Ruscha, among other artists, has started working in advertising before launching his career as a photographer and a painter. A significant part of his work has constantly examined, criticized, and found inspiration in various forms of advertising. Moreover, Ruscha’s photography book Every Building on the Sunset Strip was one of the explicit precedents that Venturi and Scott Brown referenced in Learning from Las Vegas. Ruscha drove back and forth the two miles of the Sunset Strip Boulevard in Los Angeles in a slow-moving pickup truck and used a motorized camera to take pictures of all the buildings on the two sides of the road (Figure 2.26.). The camera would capture one or two buildings to a frame120 and the result was a sequence of images that documented every building on both sides of the boulevard. The

116 Henderson and Landau, Billboard Art, 56. 117 Ibid., 61. 118 MoMA press release, 13. 119 Henderson and Landau, Billboard Art, 60-61. 120 Alexandra Schwartz, Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2010), 147. 164

photographs were assembled into a twenty-five-feet-long strip and the resulting image was folded like an accordion. Through the format of the book, the subject experiences empathetically the length of the actual boulevard. Distance and extension are perceived through elevations. Scholars have noted that while the top and bottom collages represent, respectively, the two sides of the street, the white space between them, in the middle of the page, stands for the road itself.121 “Physical movement and a shifting series of images are an essential part of the book, just as they are to the experience of the city of Los Angeles itself.”122 Ruscha’s deadpan recordings of the Sunset Strip have provided the precedents for Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour’s elevations of the Las Vegas Strip in the studio they taught at Yale in 1968.123 Moreover, Scott Brown’s article from 1969, On Pop Art, Permissiveness and Planning, was illustrated entirely with Ruscha’s images from several of his photography books.124

Since the early decades of the twentieth century, buildings have provided the physical support for billboards. With the proliferation and availability of electricity, support structures for electric spectaculars, commercial signs, and other forms of advertising have populated not only the suburban landscape, but have also been incorporated on the rooftops and walls of urban buildings.125 A symbol of consumerism, billboards began to affect directly people’s everyday lives, a phenomenon described in the films and literature of the time. One of the short stories in Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo, a collection published in 1963 and translated into English in 1983 as Marcovaldo or the Seasons in the City, describes the simultaneous lure of and disenchantment with the advertising industry.126 Living in the attic of an apartment building, Marcovaldo and his family are awaken every night by the flashy lights of a billboard placed on a building opposite theirs. The representative of a competing company encourages them to break the bulbs of the billboard that is ruining their nights. Predictably, once the first company goes bankrupt, the other

121 Schwartz, Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles, 147. 122 Ibid., 147. 123 Ruscha’s work influenced Denise Scott Brown’s ideas about representing contemporary city and her attitude toward city planning. 124 In “On Pop Art, Permissiveness and Planning,” she refers to Ruscha’s view as a “non-judgmental attitude” toward the city, which, she argues, should guide architects and planners’ approach to understanding the city and its context (Denise Scott Brown, “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35:3 (1969): 184-186). 125 Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape, 130. 126 Italo Calvino, “Moon and GNAC,” in Marcovaldo or the Seasons in the City, by Italo Calvino, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1983), 71-76. 165

one takes over the advertising space, continuing to employ the same brutal strategies that haunt the nights of Marcovaldo’s family. Calvino joins the voices of those who since mid-century have criticized the deceptive nature of the advertising industry and its manipulation of people’s naiveté and credulity.

Billboards are contested presences in the city. On the one hand, architects and pop artists, such as Robert Venturi and David Hockney, have championed the liveliness and excitement that billboards bring to the urban environment. On the other hand, cultural critics such as Sigfried Kracauer, Lewis Mumford, Jospeh Rykwert, Kenneth Frampton or Karsten Harries, have strongly opposed the rise of billboards as an unmistaken sign of capitalist consumerism. From this latter perspective, design approaches that reinforce advertising strategies raise ethical questions about the nature of architecture and architectural practices.

Artist David Hockney saw billboards as a natural growth of urban life, and their absence as a sign of arrested development. Billboards helps alleviate the collective boredom of generic public spaces:

In Peter Blake’s Form Follows Fiasco, there are before-and-after photos of wonderful streets full of signs and life and everything. That’s “before” – “after” has been sanitized. The streets look totally dull and lifeless. … Without them [billboards] the subway [in London] would be a bit dull. They provide a lot of color.127

The 1950s were a time of experimentation in the billboard industry. It was the “Golden Age of Paint,” when hand-painted billboards brought “bigger, sleeker, glossier” imagery than printed posters.128 For a while, billboards recovered the lost art of painting, thus claiming the validity and legitimacy of an art form: “To make something not photographic means to draw it. People get bored with photography. Everybody is more interested in a drawing … . … If you cannot draw, all pictures of the visible world are going to finish up being photographic or primitive.”129

127 David Hockney, “Introduction: On Billboards, Art and Artists,” in Billboard Art, by Sally Henderson and Robert Landau (London: Angus & Robertson, 1981), 6-7. 128 Henderson and Landau, Billboard Art, 48. 129 Hockney, “Introduction: On Billboards, Art and Artists,” 7. 166

Around the same time, billboards became literally mobile and subject to both physical change and change of message. With the use of “boom trucks” – trucks equipped with a 14-foot or a 20-foot crane – sections of billboards could be piled up and then “boomed up” to the upper levels of buildings.130 The result was “sign rotation:” billboards could travel throughout the city to different locations, and the advertising message would change as billboards were repainted.131 To this day, depending on the medium of advertising, the sheets can be reused and repainted. A white coat applied between two jobs provides the white canvas necessary for the new ad. Unlike a palimpsest that carries the depth of layers upon layers of words and images made present simultaneously on the same support, the billboard acts as a flat surface without a past. This double mobility – of the physical object and of the renewable message – makes billboards vehicles for change and transformation.

Moral and ethical concerns. Fostering the tension between distraction and attention, billboards carry within themselves an inherent paradox: on the one hand, their goal is to distract people from their routines, but on the other hand, they aim to arrest people’s attention through brief and compelling messages. Billboards have to provide a clean and neutral background that supports a quick and efficient rotation of messages expressed in different media, from hand painted images to digital displays.

“Distraction,” “kaleidoscopic creativity,” “visual excitement” – critics of urban advertising have proposed various names to describe the new condition, which was nothing less than an illness, engendered by the proliferation of billboards in urban environments. While the inflation of visual stimuli promises to offer a quick and immediate solution to collective and individual boredom, the flatness and obsolescence of these images fails, in fact, to provide a meaningful alternative to the tedium of everyday life.

130 Henderson, Landau, Billboard Art, 54. 131 “… an advertiser could now move his message all over town in a matter of months by using the same billboards and simply switching then around. The boom truck could easily rack and unrack boards, moving them every thirty or sixty days to new locations that represented different markets, or different cross sections of people, with four months usually the maximum duration in each place. Each client would then get a repaint of the original billboard as part of the standard contract, since wind, rain and sun took their toll, with up to three repaints a year. While the billboard was undergoing its repaint, the message could be updated or changed.” (Henderson and Landau, Billboard Art, 54). 167

Writing for the Frankfurter Zeitung in the 1920s and 1930s, Sigfried Kracauer saw the increasing exposure of the modern individual to the new forms of entertainment – advertisement, movie theaters, and radio – as a major threat against one’s own privacy and against what he called “personal boredom.”132 Confronted with the repetition of tedious working hours that alternate with purposeless leisure hours, the modern man tries to fly away from everyday boredom by turning his attention toward more and more stimuli. In this process, he finds himself caught up in an endless loop where the inflation of information does not provide the desired escape, but instead turns out to be meaningless and irrelevant:

[i]nstead of fostering cultivated conversations (which certainly can be a bore), one becomes a playground for worldwide noises that, regardless of their own potentially objective boredom, do not even grant one’s modest right to personal boredom.133

Kracauer saw in movie theaters the physical manifestations of masses’ “addiction to distraction.” The meaning of “distraction” is twofold: it encompasses various forms of entertainment and, at the same time, their effect, that of driving people away from what is essential and important. Movie theaters satisfy people’s need for entertainment, on the rise with the rapid industrialization, mass production, and the radical separation between work and leisure.134 A lack of personal and professional fulfillment draws one toward entertainment, but the resulting experiences are even less satisfying because work and leisure act as two sides of the same problem: “The form of free-time busy-ness necessarily corresponds to the form of business.”135 Superficial entertainment is flat and highjacks any attempt to delve into the depth of real problems:

The interior design of the movie theaters serves only one purpose: to rivet the viewers’ attention to the peripheral, so that they will not sink into abyss. The stimulations of the senses succeed one another with such rapidity that there is no room left between them for even the slightest contemplation.136

132 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 333. 133 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 333. 134 Ibid., 325. 135 Ibid., 325. 136 Ibid., 326. 168

This form of distraction keeps the audience busy looking forward, toward an imagined future, thus avoiding and escaping the present with its fears, worries and anxieties.

In an article published in 1962, Lewis Mumford identified two trends that responded to the “excessive regimentation” of modern architecture: the creativity of the kaleidoscope and the geodesic dome looming large in the 1950s and 1960s threatened to erode ideas about architectural integrity.137 Mumford recognized the shortcomings of modernism and the failure of its faith in technological progress, and suggested that the fall of the machine has brought the advent of the package or, in other words, that consumerism has replaced the reliance on industrialization. He directed his critique against the architectural equivalents of contemporary advertising, the package-like buildings, devoid of content, insensitive to their physical environment and to the desires and aspirations of people: “The result is the characterless package, which has become the main hallmark of fashionable architecture for the last decade” or the “dazzling Christmas packages that have no relation to contents.”138 Like an ad-man, the architect invites people to “a new taste sensation” while offering the promise to be “years ahead with the latest model.”139 Mumford argued that the “excessive virtuosity” of contemporary architecture resulted from the “creativity of the kaleidoscope,” a false form of creativity derived from the “juggling of mechanical forms.”140 He pointed to Jorn Utzorn’s Sydney Opera House and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum as such examples of an architecture interested in the extravagant, in whimsical forms, spawned from the availability of performant technologies and building methods.

Boredom was for Mumford the specific disposition that produced the fascination with this type of aesthetics: “When a child is bored or an adult is ill, the esthetics of the kaleidoscope is enchanting ….”141 Architecture emerged implicitly as a discipline in crisis: boredom was a disease and the architect, like his fellow doctor overwhelmed by the enormous quantity of drugs available, felt compelled to resort uncritically to all the new materials, methods, and techniques

137 Lewis Mumford, “The Case against Modern Architecture,” Architectural Record, Vol. 131 (April 1962): 155- 162. 138 Mumford, “The Case against Modern Architecture,” 158, 161. 139 Ibid., 156. 140 Ibid., 160. 141 Ibid., 160. 169

available at hand to prove his creativity. This approach resulted in shallow forms and the longing for continuous change:

The desire for architectural originality through a succession of kaleidoscopic changes, made possible by modern technological agents, when the inner purpose and contents are ruled out of the equation, inevitably degrades the creative process.142

Similarly, Joseph Rykwert saw the obsession with manipulating forms that emerged in the 1960s as a consequence of the “sheer tedium” induced by the flat surfaces and the mere size of the International Style buildings.143 The variations in shapes and outlines, however, in conjunction with the “flashing, constantly changing billboards” only provide “visual excitement” without addressing the core problem of boredom.144 The architecture of capitalist cities determined by profitability and economic interests was no different, Rykwert argued, from that of communist centers dictated by the strict rules of party propaganda. Billboards and neon signs were the only elements that differentiated the two types of cities:

One of the complaints about the ‘boredom’ of East European centers under Communist regimes arose from the absence of just such variegated and conflicting appeals from city walls – the buildings were, of course, no more exhilarating than those of the capitalists. Dirigist authorities had learnt how to emulate advertising, but substituted politically exhortative billboards in its place. Their message was uniformly bland and conformist, even if their formal effect on the urban scene was not all that different from that in the ‘free world’ … .145

Although Kracauer, Mumford, and Rykwert all problematized the use of billboards as precedents for architectural design, they approached the issue from different angles. Kracauer examined the notion of distraction that he identified as a feature of the film itself and of the surface of the movie theater. The architectural surface, the movie screen, and the moving images all contribute to distracting the modern individuals from their true problems. Mumford

142 Ibid., 160. 143 Joseph Rykwert, The Judicious Eye: Architecture against the Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 8. 144 Rykwert, The Judicious Eye: Architecture against the Other Arts, 8. 145 Ibid., 8. 170

condemned design approaches inspired by advertising strategies that resulted in meaningless displays of extravagant shapes and outlines, of packages devoid of content. Rykwert criticized the values of the consumerist city covered in billboards and flashy electric signs that obliterate architecture and public spaces.

Implicit in all these accounts is the warning that attempting to heal boredom through distraction and entertainment, a tendency best illustrated in the proliferation of billboards, will result in a relapse into tedium and anxiety. Each critic proposed a different alternative to thes problems posed by the intersection of billboards and architecture. Kracauer suggested a non- architectural solution: one should isolate herself, if temporary, from the hustle-and-bustle of the city, in order to exercise their patience in slow motion and have access to contemplation through boredom.146 Boredom, for Kracauer, proves that one is “still in control of one’s own existence.”147 Mumford identified the creativity of the kaleidoscope and the geodesic domes as the main pressures threatening the integrity of midcentury architecture and singled out two alternative directions already present in the discipline. One positive change, in Mumford’s view, was that, no longer willing to accept the modernist tabula rasa, architecture students started demanding architectural history classes in the university curriculum. The other hopeful change, which speaks of Mumford’s own biases, was the growing interest in environmental design at the University of California, Berkeley where the School of Architecture became the School of Environmental Design. 148 Writing in 2008, Rykwert advocated a more rigorous control of outdoor advertising in urban areas pointing out to two historical examples: the Defense d’afficher French law from July 29, 1881 that banned wall advertising on particular buildings and areas of Paris, and, more recently, the restrictive use of electronic advertising in Sao Paolo, Brazil, in effect from January 1, 2007.

As the neo-liberal economy became more prevalent in the late 1960s and the 1970s, the advertising industry turned into one of the main players on the urban scene. Not only were buildings wrapped in billboards, but they became billboards. Borrowing from the language of the

146 Kracaeur, The Mass Ornament, 334. 147 Ibid., 334. 148 Mumford, “The Case against Modern Architecture,” 162. 171

advertising industry, Venturi’s reliance on the flatness of commercial signs revealed, though never explicitly, a desire to flatten not only surfaces, but also meanings. Displaying colorful and lively images, billboards offer a quick fix to the problem of collective ennui in dull urban spaces. At the same time, critics have noted, they expose the mechanisms of power and control of merciless consumerism and disregard the fabric and the context of the city.

Venturi appropriates the inherent paradox of billboards that are both shallow and deep, immediate and distant, fast and slow. The next section looks at three of his projects where these tensions offer a rich material of investigation.

2.3 More is not less.

This last section will focus on three projects that show different instances in Venturi’s approach to flatness, which I explore in two way, as architectural flatness and as flatness of meaning. Specifically, I am interested in ideas about frontal perception and the paradox of attempting to flatten meaning in a world described as increasingly complex. This paradox rests at the core of Venturi’s theoretical and practical positions, but is never fully recognized or embraced. His position borrows from the strategies employed in contemporary forms of advertising (primarily billboards), but also finds its roots in Venturi’s ties with the Quakers.

Venturi’s linear descriptions of his own projects go to great lengths to clarify and expose the reasoning embedded in the design process. The descriptions are exhaustive, but it is precisely this exhaustion that makes them thin.149 The claim of absolute clarity and transparency fails to account for the hidden system of meanings inherent to architectural practice and inhabitation. If boredom is the demon of noontide,150 then this tedium engenders a world of smooth surfaces without shadows, where meanings are also flatten through over-precise explanations. If less is, indeed, a bore, then how do flat surfaces and flat meanings restore the complexity of the world?

149 I am paraphrasing Clifford Geertz’s use of the term “thick description,” which he defined as a mode of situating people and their actions within a specific cultural context (Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3-30). 150 Kuhn, Reinhard. The Demon of Noontide. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976 172

On the other hand, overstimulation and the reliance on the interesting, which are implicit in Venturi’s propositions, bring one back into the endless loop of boredom.

In my speculative readings of three projects (Venturi’s thesis project for the Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953 (Figure 2.27.); the National Football Hall of Fame, 1967 (Figure 2.28.); and the Guild House, 1963-1966 (Figure 2.29.)), issues of frontal perception are intertwined with ideas about boredom in a world of flat surfaces and plain meanings. Although the main concern in the project for the Chapel for the Episcopal Academy is its relationship with the context, I am particularly interested in the organization of the interior spaces where the Quaker influence is present in subtle, yet meaningful ways. The competition entry for the National Football Hall of Fame reinforces the tension between flat surfaces and architectural depth and illustrates directly design strategies borrowed from the billboard industry. Lastly, a project extensively scrutinized in architectural scholarship, the Guild House invites to an alternative interpretation that brings together boredom, mythology, and contemporary art.

Quaker influences: The Chapel for the Episcopal Academy (1953) (Figure 2.27.). Venturi’s interest in religious architecture dates back to his undergraduate studies at Princeton. In a school project for a Roman Catholic church he had brought together the conventional features of traditional Catholic worship spaces: open narthex, basilical plan, longitudinal axis, a tower (Figure 2.30.). At the same time, he experimented with asymmetries and the positioning of the tower above the altar rather than at the entrance or adjacent to it (Figure 2.30). In what appears to be a quick 6- or 9-hour long sketch problem151 he enclosed the altar with a timber structure that filtered down the light – the only light source of the church, as shown in the interior rendering.152

Venturi’s thesis begins with a prologue that states the main intent of the project: “to demonstrate the importance of and the effect of setting on a building.” His main inquiries and explorations seem to revolve around the issue of context. Venturi writes:

151 Following the Beaux Arts model, in architectural education the 6- or 9-hour long sketch problem was a common design exercise in the curriculum. Students received the assignment usually in the morning and had to submit the project by the end of the day. 152 The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown; Venturi’s design projects during his studies at Princeton. 173

“A building is not a self-contained object but a part in a whole composition relative to other parts and to the whole.”

“Change in context causes change in expression. Change of a part (addition or alteration) causes a change in the other parts and in the whole.”

“These relationships are constantly relative to the observer’s visual reactions, limit of attention and situation.”

“The architect accepts and creates context.”153

The case studies presented at the beginning of the thesis, as well as the design proposal that follows, illustrate the relationships between a building and its context, where the latter is understood mainly as physical and built presence, rather than as a larger and more complex cultural, social, and historical reality. Although Venturi explicitly draws on the principles of Gestalt psychology, and his formalist approach is highly indebted to the Gestalt figure-ground studies, Quaker values, although never overtly stated, have been critical in shaping his approach.

Conceptually, the thesis has three parts, which, almost in a scientific manner, construct the demonstration through (1) hypothesis, (2) testing, and (3) conclusions: (1) the theoretical premise stating the focus on context, (2) a series of case studies that bring supporting evidence, and (3) the concrete application of these ideas shown in the design of the Chapel for the Episcopal Academy. Visually, Venturi organizes a storyboard through horizontal and vertical connections between various parts of the project. Two parallel horizontal threads follow the ideas that “context gives a building expression” and “change in context causes change in expression” (Figure 2.31.). These horizontal lines begin with general composition principles (such as priority, juxtaposition, direction, etc.) and conclude with the chapel design. In the precedents section, vertical strips show changes over time in the context of the same building (Figure 2.32.).

It is relevant to observe the case studies, organized based on the comparative method that Venturi will continue to employ throughout his entire career. Although the precedents are

153 The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown; Venturi’s thesis project: A Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, Merion, PA. 174

divided into two sections, titled “Rome” and “contemporary domestic architecture,” the former includes two examples from other locations, Paris and Philadelphia.154 The section on domestic architecture shows mostly precedents from the 1930-1940, with the exception of the 1830 Hoffman-Simpson House from Salem, Massachusetts. None of the precedents in these categories is identified by its author, although some of them do have notable names: the apartments in Aluminum City, Pennsylvania were designed by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, and the apartments in Leipzig (or the Siedlung Rundlung Leipzig) were designed by the German modern architect Hubert Ritter. Since Venturi has always claimed the standards of academic rigor in his work, this lack of authorship, whether a negligence or a deliberate omission, could be attributed to certain Quaker ethical principles that tend to de-emphasize the individual, and implicitly the author, in favor of the community.

The very notion of context (although not necessarily formulated as such) has been at the core of Quaker thought. To be “in the world, but not of it” suggests both a sense of belonging to and one of alienation from the environment. The same Quaker attitude that embraces the everyday while aspiring to receive the higher Inner Light, guides the apparently unlikely association of precedents drawn from the most ordinary architecture and the sophisticated one set in a city like Rome. The very idea of looking at domestic precedents for an ecclesiastical building might appear unusual, but, from a Quaker standpoint, the worship house (or the meeting house, as it is typically called) belongs, in fact, to everyday life and architecture; therefore such precedents are not only accepted, but legitimate. Quaker meeting houses do not stand out in their environment, but, as we have seen, they preserve the notion of history as genealogy.

Venturi’s proposed chapel is intended to act as a mediator between the existing buildings on campus:

“This country day school consists essentially of two converted eclectic mansions. These buildings in their present function are unrelated in their position and form.”

154 The precedents grouped under the “Rome” section include the following pairings: Trevi fountain and St. Michel Fountain in Paris; St. Ignazio in the 17th and the 18th centuries; Santissima Trinita in 1650 and 1725; Campidoglio in 1538, 1644, 1938; the Pantheon, a building in Philadelphia and the University of Virginia. The precedents drawn from domestic architecture include: Johnson Site, Racine in 1936 and 1937; the Hoffman-Simpson House, Salem, MA, 1830 and the Keck House, Belmont, MA, 1940; apartments, Leipzig, 1935 [here the date is wrong, the correct year is 1930] and apartments in Aluminum City, PA, 1942. 175

“The new chapel in its position and form is conceived as a changed context which causes a changed expression – meaning.”

“Two mansions become one institution.”

“The whole is articulated and unified by the addition of a part.”155

Whether the chapel does accomplish its original goal is a matter open to debate. Venturi attempts to situate the new building as a joint between two existing mansions, thus creating a linear sequence of three buildings (Figure 2.33.). Most of the precedents presented at the beginning of the thesis show urban configurations that create public spaces. Therefore, from this point of view, one could argue that the chapel fails to create an urban plaza in relation to the other two buildings. On the other hand, however, smaller, semi-enclosed public spaces do come into existence through the siting of the proposed chapel between the two existing buildings. This placement does not seem to be the most obvious choice in the given context: the main body of the chapel is not parallel to the other two buildings, instead it is slightly misaligned and appears to reference a different direction. It is only the enclosure of the entry courtyard that acknowledges the geometry of the existing buildings (Figure 2.33.).

The different articulations that Venturi proposes, though purely formal, do not derive exclusively from the objective principles of Gestalt psychology, as claimed in the explanatory text. Gestalt does emphasize complexity of meaning, as well as an ambiguous figure-ground relationship in a way similar to the technique of two-dimensional silhouettes employed as forms of portraiture in early Quaker culture. Venturi’s proposal introduces a certain tension between new and old elements of the architectural composition that finds its roots, if implicitly, in Quaker beliefs. The paradox of being “in the world, but not of it,” of being at once part of and remote from the environment, of blending in while inadvertently standing out, reflects the overall attitude of Quakers toward the world. A sense of discomfort with the outside world, of unease and tension has characterized Friends’ behavior throughout centuries. To translate an internal state, most of the times unspoken and concealed, into a physical reality is not an easy task. Venturi projects, if unconsciously, the elements he is familiar with from his own upbringing onto

155 The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown; Venturi’s thesis project: A Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, Merion, PA. 176

a chapel project that requires a different level of introspection and sensitivity than more conventional, lay architectures.

In addition to the chapel, the scheme includes a “war memorial space” that utilizes in its composition “an existing large dead tree trunk to create an atmosphere expressive of war as tragic”156 (Figure 2.34.). While the use of spolia had had a long tradition in architectural history, modern architecture, however, was largely indifferent to the idea of constructing meaning through recycling elements carrying a certain history. In 1950, at the time of Venturi’s thesis, incorporating spolia was highly uncommon. On the other hand, we have seen that Quaker building traditions embraced the re-use of old architectural elements in new projects with a twofold purpose: for economic reasons and as a way of carrying through the history and genealogy of the place. While Venturi’s intention of incorporating a large dead tree trunk in his composition would go unnoticed today and perhaps even considered naïve, in the context of his thesis it was probably an unusual approach, subtly revealing influences of Quaker practices on his work.

However, where the Quaker mark bears its most noticeable influence is in the organization of the interior space of the chapel for the Episcopal Academy. After the American Revolution, the Episcopal Church has separated from the Church of England. More recently, it has described itself as “Protestant, yet Catholic,”157 stating: “Anglicanism stands squarely in the Reformed tradition, yet considers itself just as directly descended from the Early Church as the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox churches.”158 Venturi designs a floorplan that is a hybrid between the typology of Roman Catholic churches and Quaker meetings houses. Geometrically, the plan is a longitudinal volume that consists of five squares (Figure 2.27.). Spatially, it constructs the sequence of spaces that in a Roman Catholic church (which Venturi has studied in the past, as his earlier student projects show) create the transition from the most profane to the

156 The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown; Venturi’s thesis project: A Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, Merion, PA. 157 The Book of Common Prayer, the central publication of the Church that outlines its doctrine and worship services, has gone through several revisions, the most recent dating from 1979, when the Church adopted many of the principles outlined by Second Vatican Council from 1962, including the restoration of the Eucharist. 158 “What Makes Us Anglican? Hallmarks of the Episcopal Church,” accessed September 5, 2017, https://www.episcopalchurch.org/library/article/what-makes-us-anglican. 177

most sacred: outdoors courtyard, narthex, nave with two aisles separated by a central circulation, and sanctuary.

The directionality specific to Roman Catholic churches is contradicted, however, by the setting of the pews: instead of facing the sanctuary, as it is common in both Catholic and Episcopal worship spaces, the two aisles of pews are, instead, facing each other – a layout specific to Quaker meetinghouses (Figure 2.35.). Therein, Friends have oriented the benches toward each other as a way of constructing a stronger sense of interaction between the members of the congregation, a configuration still preserved in contemporary architecture (Figure 2.36.). This layout is a direct consequence of the Quaker canon that puts the community at its core and where the lack of ministry or priesthood is translated architecturally into the absence of a sanctuary or an altar. Venturi’s chapel for the Episcopal Academy embraces both Roman Catholic and Quaker characteristics. The drawings indicate a stepping up in section in two directions: the first occurs as one moves from the narthex through the nave toward the sanctuary (Figure 2.37.), and the second unfolds within the nave itself (Figure 2.38.). Spatially, the nave is separated from the narthex and the sanctuary, but the two aisles of pews are also stepping up above the central horizontal circulation. This arrangement is not simply a matter of furniture layout, but a deliberate decision to focus the design on the congregation. Moreover, given the nature of the space as a chapel for an educational institution, Venturi chooses to emphasize the educational aspect and to focus on the space of the community, rather than that of the sanctuary.

The section and the rendered interior perspective give us more indications on how to interpret the space (Figure 2.39-2.40). The structure consists of a series of trusses spanning between the lateral walls, which create a strong roof form, continuous along the length of the entire chapel. The roof / ceiling is identical over the nave and over the altar, thus reinforcing the reading of the space as non-hierarchical. Venturi’s note reads: “All compressive members are wood. All tensile members are steel. Truss color scheme is blue, green and violet which are floating colors and make a vibrating contrast.”159 This color scheme might appear rather unusual in a worship space, but it puts an emphasis on the continuity of the truss that visually and spatially connects the narthex, the nave, and the sanctuary (Figure 2.40.). The truss also acts as a

159 The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown; Venturi’s thesis project: A Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, Merion, PA. 178

lighting mechanism through which the nave receives an indirect lateral light that washes the walls, whereas the sanctuary, raised above the level of the nave, is flooded in light.

In Quaker doctrine, light has a particular nature and relevance: individuals have access to spirituality not through their own will, but through what is called the Inner Light. Manifested only through revelation, the Inner Light does not engage with the sensible world. Quakers passively wait for and receive revelation in a physical world devoid of spiritual qualities. There are no corporeal mediators between the divine and the human. (This act of passive waiting might contain the seeds of what Venturi and Scott Brown will later refer to as “deferred judgment.”) Just as the Inner Light constitutes the unseen core of Quaker theology, the truss with its “vibrating contrast” constitutes the spine of the chapel: suspended, floating, illuminating. Moreover, the roof gently guides the light toward the sidewalls, rather than directly dropping it through the dramatic central spine. If the sidewalls are relatively bright from the roof lighting, then people sitting in the pews will be backlit and appear like silhouettes to those sitting across the aisle. Built on the tension between the seen and the unseen, light and matter, spiritual world and physical world, the chapel embodies the motto of the Episcopal Academy: Esse Quam Videri (“To Be, Rather than to Seem to Be”).160

It is relevant to compare Venturi’s thesis project with his firm’s much later design for the Episcopal Academy Chapel, Newtown Square, PA, completed in 2008. Founded in Philadelphia in 1795, the Episcopal Academy had established two campuses, in Devon and Merion, PA. The two campuses were consolidated into one and relocated in Newtown Square, PA.161 It was for this new campus that the firm VSBA designed the new chapel, conceived as “an iconic campus landmark – immediately identifiable and symbolic of the new campus, yet also a well-used and highly-functional school facility.”162 Unlike Venturi’s 1950 thesis project whose emphasis on community was translated in a non-hierarchical architectural composition, the 2008 chapel proposes a different architectural and spiritual order (Figure 2.41.). The fan-shaped plan has a clear orientation toward the altar, which is marked volumetrically by a prominent tower (Figure

160 “Diversity and Inclusion,” accessed February 8, 2018, https://www.episcopalacademy.org/school-life/diversity- and-inclusion-odi. 161 “Episcopal Academy Chapel,” accessed September 6, 2017, http://venturiscottbrown.org/pdfs/EpiscopalAcademyChapel02.pdf. 162 “Episcopal Academy Chapel,” accessed September 6, 2017, http://venturiscottbrown.org/pdfs/EpiscopalAcademyChapel02.pdf. 179

2.42.). The relationship between different pieces and the altar / tower offers a different reading from Venturi’s thesis project. Despite the claim that the plan “allows the worshipers to face each other as well as the altar, nurturing a sense of togetherness and community,”163 the 2008 chapel shows, in fact, a hierarchical relationship, where the community and its space are subordinated to the ministry and its altar.

Ideas that Venturi will develop in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture are emerging in his thesis project. He applies the relationship figure-ground and whole-to-parts (appropriated from Gestalt psychology) to the siting of the chapel in relation with the campus and the neighboring buildings. While the exterior of the chapel appears rather plane, ideas about flat surfaces are not yet made explicit. However, the intention to flatten meanings through over- specific explanations is already at work in the almost scientific manner of presenting the project. The very fact that Quaker principles and beliefs quietly inform the design, without ever being “explained,” shows how the claim for absolute clarity fails to account for a network of significances still inexplicable.

Frontality: The Bill-ding-board (1967) (Figure 2.28.). In 1967, the firm of Venturi and Rauch working with Gerod Clark as collaborator, entered the competition for the National Football Hall of Fame in New Brunswick, NJ. Although they did not win (and one of Venturi’s articles on this topic is illustrated, in his characteristic self-deprecating manner, with a competition board stamped with the word “Loser”164), the project is relevant for two reasons. First, it is an early explicit use of billboards in Venturi’s designs. Second, it calls into question the dichotomy duck – decorated shed that Venturi and Scott Brown will later develop in Learning from Las Vegas.

Venturi described the entry as a hybrid between a building and a billboard – a bill-ding- board – just as some of the previous projects he presented as hybrids between architecture and landscape (FDR Memorial (Figure 2.43.)), architecture and sculpture (Philadelphia Fairmount

163 “Episcopal Academy Chapel,” accessed September 6, 2017, http://venturiscottbrown.org/pdfs/EpiscopalAcademyChapel02.pdf. 164 Robert Venturi, “Entry for the National Football Hall of Fame Competition,” Architecture Canada 45, No. 10 (October 1968): 50. 180

Park (Figure 2.44.)) or architecture and urban design (Copley Square (Figure 2.45.)).165 The program had to accommodate exhibition spaces along with administrative, research, and dining facilities. Venturi’s firm’s response to the competition brief consisted of a gigantic screen oriented toward the parking lot and attached to a solid structure that incorporated the exhibition halls and the other required spaces.

Venturi talked about this project in two slightly different articles published the same year, one in April 1968, in Architectural Forum, the other one in October 1968, in Architecture Canada.166 Both articles acknowledged the original intention to design the building in the shape of a football.167 This proposal (which did not materialize) illustrated what Venturi and Scott Brown will later criticize in Learning from Las Vegas, as the duck. Deemed irrelevant in the context of contemporary culture, the duck stood for those architectural forms that directly expressed their purpose or function. They argued that this position, common in modernism, had its roots deeply embedded into centuries of architectural history. Presented as the opposite attitude, the decorated shed defined a plain structure with a billboard attached onto it that would directly communicate the purpose of the building.168

Although described as a dichotomy, the duck and the decorated shed present, in fact, two sides of the same coin as they both define architecture as symbol. The bill-ding-board is a case in point. Conceptually (although Venturi argues otherwise), there is no fundamental difference between a building shaped as a football and one shaped as a gigantic billboard. They both aspire to communicate an architectural message in a direct, unmediated form, they both simplify architecture to a finite object, and they both stimulate visual perception.

The design combined projection, graphics and traditional architectural space to create a media iconography – to teach as well as to entertain a large audience. The scheme emphasized a high degree of interaction. Films of great moments in college football

165 Robert Venturi; Denise Scott Brown, A View from the Campidoglio: Selected Essays 1953-1984 (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1984), 14. 166 Robert Venturi, “A Bill-ding-board Involving Movies, Relics, and Space,” Architectural Forum 128 (April 1968): 74-79 (this one will be republished in A View from the Campidoglio) and Robert Venturi, “Entry for the National Football Hall of Fame Competition,” Architecture Canada 45, No. 10 (October 1968): 50-53. 167 Venturi, “A Bill-ding-board Involving Movies, Relics, and Space,” 76; Venturi, “Entry for the National Football Hall of Fame Competition,” 51. 168 Venturi and Scott Brown, Learning from Las Vegas. 181

history were projected over the interior surfaces. A rich mix of motion and changing scales was used to recreate the excitement of the sport.169

The desire to teach and entertain acted as a remedy to boredom. Ideas drawn from billboard industry, reiterated inside the exhibition hall through panels that flipped, turned, moved, and rotated, provided the excitement for the “jaded senses which respond only to bold stimuli.”170 Claiming the billboard as a design strategy, Venturi employed it mainly as a vehicle for communication, like an oversized commercial sign. Implicit in this approach was understanding the billboard as a white canvas used as a background for entertainment and distraction – the most facile (and ultimately ineffective) cures for boredom.

Venturi recognized the ambiguity between the message of the billboard and its physical structure. The most publicized image of the building is an interior perspective rendered as a collage that emphasizes movement and transparency (Figure 2.28). However, in the process drawings and the competition boards, the rendering of the back façade of the billboard shows deep shadows and strong contrasts that indicate not a light metal structure, but rather a heavy, dramatic concrete building (Figure 2.46.). A strong sense of front and back perceptions guided the design:

The exterior of the building was designed to create an arrival sequence, which heightened the tourist’s sense of anticipation. The rear of the building was integrated with a grandstand facing the Hall of Fame Football Field.171

Working sketches for the billdingboard show several iterations of the façade facing the parking lot where the name of the building sometimes occupies as much as half of the elevation height. The name itself – National Football Hall of Fame – is spelled as a visual pun: the word football is replaced by the image of a football whose position would also mark the main entrance (Figure 2.47.). For the competition boards, the rear elevation (which corresponds to the back of the billboard) was rendered with heavy shadows indicating the sturdy structure of a building rather than the lighter one of a billboard. The name played the role of a commercial sign that

169 “Football Hall of Fame,” accessed December 9, 2017, http://venturiscottbrown.org/pdfs/FootballHallofFame01.pdf 170 Venturi; Scott Borwn, A View from the Campidoglio, 15. 171 Accessed December 9, 2017, http://venturiscottbrown.org/pdfs/FootballHallofFame01.pdf 182

identified the building, while the giant screen on which hundreds of thousands of electronically programed lights “would produce moving sequences of naturalistic images, words and phrases, and diagrammatic choreographies of famous football plays,” acted as an oversized electric spectacular.172

With the enormous screen facing the parking lot, and words, images, and famous football plays projected onto it, the billdingboard recalls not only the conspicuous billboards, but also the drive-in movie theaters of midcentury. The history of drive-in movie theaters begins with Richard Hollingstead, an auto-parts salesman who, after having experimented for a few years with different ideas about car arrangements, heights and optimal visibility, in May 1933 patented a ramp system to allow cars to park at different heights. A month later, on June 6 1933, he opened the first drive-in theater, in Camden, NJ.173 Venturi’s subsequent description of the project includes specific references to theaters: “The idea that a space can be transformed by light and pictures is an old one in the theater but a relatively recent concept in architecture and the commercial world.”174

In his Either / Or, Søren Kierkegaard has recognized the desire for constant change as one of the main symptoms of boredom. He made the argument that a state of perpetual variation provides only a temporary and deceptive sense of gratification and leads, in fact, to greater dissatisfaction. He called this phenomenon “the rotation of crops” and described it as a “vulgar, inartistic rotation,” “based on an illusion:”

One is weary of living in the country and moves to the city; one is weary of one’s native land and goes abroad; one is europamude [weary of Europe] and goes to America etc.; one indulges in the fanatical hope of an endless journey from star to star. Or there is another direction, but still extensive. One is weary of eating on porcelain and eats on silver; wearying of that, one eats on gold … .175

172 I am borrowing the terminology from Agnew, Outdoor Advertising. 173 Robin T. Reid, “The History of the Drive-In Movie Theatre,” Smithsonian Magazine (May 27, 2008), accessed July 10, 2014, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-history-of-the-drive-in-movie-theater-51331221/ 174 “Football Hall of Fame,” accessed December 9, 2017, http://venturiscottbrown.org/pdfs/FootballHallofFame01.pdf 175 Soren Kierkegaard, Either/ Or trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 291-292. 183

Kierkegaard opposed two principles: the surface extension and the intensity of the cultivation. Instead of frequently searching for other lands, one should change the “method of cultivation and the kinds of crops.” In other words, one should work within the parameters available at hand, understanding the latent potential of that which is accessible: “The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.”176

Flipping a horizontal surface into a vertical one emphasizes the principle of surface extension, which, in the development of the billdingboard, became a core design strategy. The billboard, described as “enormous” and “giant,” is 100ft high by 210ft long, its proportion (approximately 2:1) resembling that of a football field (160ft wide by 360ft long).177 The iconic image of the project shows the display of a football player in motion projected onto the gigantic screen (Figure 2.17). The billdingboard collapses the horizontal and vertical dimensions. Flipping the horizontal football field to a vertical billboard makes visible the speed and fast movements that usually unfold on the flat surface. One usually moves on, or along, a horizontal surface, but looks at a vertical element. By switching from horizontality to verticality, Venturi also changes the type of perception of the inhabitant of architecture who turns from an active participant to a passive spectator.

The shift between the horizontal and the vertical can occur in both directions. Catherine Gudis has associated the shift in the orientation of billboards from vertical to horizontal with the changing dynamics of cities evolving from vertical development to urban sprawl:

“Vertically reaching tiers of billboard structures holding numerous ads were consolidated into individual, larger, horizontally stretching boards. … The boards now imitated the lateral expansion of the city itself, from vertically oriented metropolis to horizontally sprawling strip and suburban developments.”178

Advertising manuals have provided from early on guidelines of psychological laws for buying and selling. Two of them – involving size and attention – are particularly relevant for this

176 Ibid., 292. 177 Venturi; Scott Brown, A View from the Campidoglio, 15. 178 Catherine Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape (New York: Routledge, 2004), 146. 184

discussion.179 One of these laws claimed that “size is another element that affects suggestion. Large fortunes, books, buildings, displays, rivers and animals are impressive.”180 Another law differentiated between “attention to the message itself and attention to the object the message is supposed to sell” and warned about the risk of inadvertently shifting attention from the product to the actual picture.181 Big size and the play between attention and distraction are also key elements in Venturi’s billdingboard whose design relies, on the one hand, on the oversized billboard as a physical architectural element, and, on the other hand, on a specific type of perception. Billboards (or decorated sheds) construct a mode of perception based on a short attention span that does not allow the eye to rest onto the image; instead, the viewer will grasp the message instantly and quickly float over the surface without dwelling on it. The original intention to design the project in the shape of a football (the duck) would have prompted a similar reaction from the spectator: invited to look at an object, the viewer would rapidly glance over and move on.

Reducing the experience of architecture to the dichotomy duck – decorated shed does not, in fact, answer questions of relevance, significance or meaning. Both the duck and the decorated shed are closed objects that do not open up the possibility of further engagement or action. Both the duck and the decorated shed are prescriptive and normative, self-referential and autonomous. Detached and disconnected from their contexts, they perpetuate the boredom and alienation of their inhabitants.

Flatness: The Guild House (1963-1966) (Figure 2.29.). After Orson Wells had broadcasted an alien invasion live on his radio show on Halloween of 1938, friendlier Martians invaded American televisions. Between 1963 and 1966, the TV series My Favorite Martian brought to American households an anthropologist from Mars whose airship had crashed and landed him close to Los Angeles. Among many different skills, Uncle Martin, as his terrestrial friend Tim called him, had the power to extend two retractable antennae from his head which immediately connected him to the network of waves present everywhere in his environment, but

179 Agnew, Outdoor Advertising, 193. 180 Ibid., 205-6. 181 Ibid., 208. 185

invisible to ordinary people (Figure 2.48.). The decades of the 1950s and 1960s saw a boom in radio, X-Ray, ultraviolet and infrared technologies that attempted not only to make visible otherwise imperceptible signals, but also to connect humans with the outer space. The twitching nose of the modern witch in Bewitched was perhaps also another sort of antenna sensitive to atmospherical changes (Figure 2.49.). Political undertones of the American – Russian space race aside, the universe was brought within reach into one’s own living room as shown in Richard Hamilton’s 1954 collage Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Home so Different, so Appealing? where a (menacing?) planet hovers indoors right in the middle of the house, above the couch and the coffee table (Figure 2.50.). The enthrallment with the invisible networks surrounding us has been ubiquitous in the popular culture. In the 1999 comedy Entrapment, Catherine Zeta Jones plays the role of an insurance agent sent by her employer to help capture an art thief. As part of her training, she learns how to navigate blindfolded a network of unseen rays that surround and protect the most valuable art works in a museum.

It was in the context of post-war exalted consumerism, in a world awakening its fascination with technological gadgets and invisible networks that Robert Venturi designed the Guild House (1963-1966), the residence for the elderly opened in Philadelphia in 1966. In a curious architectural move that has been amply discussed by scholars and architectural critics, on the roof-top of the house, centered on its axis, he placed an antenna (Figure 2.51.). It was a non- functional, purely decorative aerial made famous in Venturi’s first book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture:

The television antenna atop this axis and beyond the otherwise constant height line of the building strengthens this axis of scale-change in the zone of the central façade, and expresses a kind of monumentality similar to that at the entrance of Anet. The antenna, with its anodized gold surface, can be interpreted two ways: abstractly, as a sculpture in the manner of Lippold, and as a symbol of the aged, who spend so much time looking at T.V.182

182 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1972), 116. 186

How are we to interpret Venturi’s brief references? How do they relate to each other, if at all? Is Venturi giving us clues about a larger, unseen topic at stake in his design? Or, perhaps, what we see is simply what we get?

At the official opening of the Guild House, Venturi “presented a small bouquet of fresh cut flowers to each occupant.”183 The only child of a well-to-do family of Italian descent, Venturi, as we have seen, was brought up as a Quaker following the conversion of his mother who felt that the Friends were the only religious group that suited her pacifist position and liberal views. Completed with federal funding, the Guild House was the initiative of Francis Bosworth, the executive director of the Friends Neighborhood Guild, a non-profit social welfare agency founded in 1879 and affiliated with the Quakers. Close to his aging mother (his father had passed away in 1959), Venturi was sympathetic to the needs of the elderly. His project aimed to provide them the maximum degree of comfort and variety possible under the budgetary restrictions imposed by the Federal Housing and Home Agency whose guidelines required that the “building design must not be elaborate or ornate.”184

The press release issued at the opening of the Guild House (which has been originally drafted by Venturi himself) singled out the interior flexibility achieved through the structural system, along with the entertainment system as two of the main features of the building:

Construction of the fireproof structure is flat plate reinforced concrete which permitted wide latitude in interior design to relieve monotony without undue increases in construction costs. A master TV antenna is included and air-conditioning is at the resident’s option.185

From this curious association of construction flexibility with entertainment it appears that two of the important characteristics of the building were also the two major sources to “relieve

183 Robert Charles Venturi, Jr., and Denise Scott Brown, Architectural Records, 1936-2009; The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown; VSB Collection 225.II.A. box.4. folder 6104.41. Typed press release from August 11, 1966. 184 VSB Collection 225.II.A. box.2. folder 6104.27. Housing and Home Finance Agency, Community Facilities Administration, Washington 25, D.C.; Senior Citizens Housing Loan Program: Policies and Guides for Project Design. 185 VSB Collection 225.II.A. box.4. folder 6104.41. Typed press release from August 11, 1966. This was the official press release that was based on information delivered by Venturi. The VSB Collection includes the hand-written text he has drafted which is a description of the building according to different criteria: owner, site, project, financial requirements, design, and special features. (VSB Collection 225.II.A. box.4. folder 6104.41.) 187

monotony,” or, in other words, to fight boredom: the structural system that allowed for design variety, and television.

But what does television have to do with architecture? A lot, would have answered Mr. Venturi. A sign of progress and good care toward the elderly, the antenna mentioned in the press release was different, however, from the one described in Complexity and Contradiction. In fact, period photographs show several antennas placed on the roof of the Guild House behind the ornamental piece that occupies the foreground (Figure 2.52.). So here we have several “real” antennas, a “fake” one, a French chateau, and an American artist. How do they all converse with each other and how do they converse in the story and history of the Guild House?

Golden horns. At the beginning of the paragraph describing the antenna, Venturi references the monumentality of Anet. A French chateau built by the architect Philibert de l’Orme from 1547 to 1552, Anet was a gift from King Henri II of France to his mistress, Diane de Poitiers (Figure 2.53.). Although the castle did not suffer major damages during the French revolution, its contents were auctioned, and some architectural elements were retrieved and displayed by the French archaeologist Alexandre Lenoir in his Musée des monuments français (Museum of French Monuments). Lenoir had started the museum in order to rescue works of art and architecture from the ravages of the revolution and present them to a larger audience. Although partly demolished, the Anet castle will survive due to subsequent owners who will invest in its restoration. Some of the objects removed will be reinstalled into their original context after World War II.

The reference to the Anet castle has a twofold significance: built at a time when architecture was taking a Mannerist shift, the castle illustrates Venturi’s fondness of the styles of the sixteenth century. In the preface to Complexity and Contradiction he states that “The examples chosen [in the book] reflect my partiality for certain eras: Mannerist, Baroque and Rococo especially.”186

At the same time, the troubled history of the castle suggests an unfavorable destiny that is often the fate of works of art which are either misinterpreted, or become fatalities of hostile historical circumstances. Venturi has constructed a public persona of a marginal, often

186 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 13. 188

misunderstood figure operating at the periphery of the profession, so the reference to a “victimized” architecture suited his autobiographical profile. With parts of the castle located in the Musée des monuments français, itself situated inside the École des Beaux Arts – the temple of classical art – Anet stands not only for the monumentality of form that Venturi alludes to, but also for classical art in general thus legitimizing its architectural and historical value. Whether Venturi was aware of the details of this history is less relevant. Examining the Anet castle as a precedent opens up a speculative reading of the Guild House that situates the building in a larger cultural context of ideas, showing the often invisible networks of significances within which we operate.

What exactly did Venturi see in the entrance of Anet that spawned his analogy? It was the imposing statue of a stag with prominent antlers crowning the entrance gate to the castle that most likely prompted Venturi’s parallel between the antenna on the Guild House and the French chateau (Figure 2.54.). The statue is a reference to Diane de Poitiers, the Lady of the estate and portrays her as Diana, the Roman goddess of hunt. The correlation was based on more than the namesake: herself an unusually athletic woman for the time, Diane de Poitiers used to swim, hunt, and ride horses every day, bearing a close resemblance to the fearless goddess of hunt and wilderness.187 Cold and ambitious, Diane placed herself as a majestic statue at the entrance of the palace, guarding it from above. Her chateau portrays not an architecture of pleasure, but rather, in the image of its mistress, one of calculated schemes and cold strategies.188

A curious and unforeseen twist of fate shows the invisible and often unaccounted for, network of connections surrounding us. Much like the unseen infrared rays protecting the artwork in Entrapment, intricate invisible systems occupy the space around us, waiting to be discovered and made present. Beside the formal analogy between the antenna on the American residence and the statue at the entrance of the French castle, there is another latent meaning in this comparison. In Roman mythology, the goddess of hunt had a fast and strong white stag that Hercules had to capture as one of his twelve labors and, eventually, ended up freeing upon the

187 Philippe Charlier, Joel Poupon, Isabelle Huynh-Charlier, Jean-Francois Saliege, Dominique Favier, Christine Keyser and Bertrand Ludes, “Fatal Alchemy,” BMJ: British Medical Journal, Vol. 339, No. 7735 (19-26 December 2009): 1402. 188 Henri Lefebvre, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, trans. Roberto Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 22. 189

completion of his tasks. Legend has it that Diana’s stag had golden horns. As Diana herself came to be identified with the moon,189 the association of the sun (represented by the golden antlers of the stag) and the moon suggested the wholeness of the universe.

Twenty years older than her royal lover, Diane de Poitiers embodies the complicated theme of age and aging, so appropriate in the context of a residence for the elderly. She passed away in 1566 at age 66 under unknown circumstances, but her remains were found only in 2008, in a common grave where her body was supposedly thrown after the revolutionists had opened her tomb in 1795.190 Forensic investigations have identified the presence of gold in her physical remains.191 Scientific evidence thus corroborates what was previously known from unverified period testimonies, namely that Diane de Poitiers was ingesting gold as an elixir for permanent youth. “We have identified Diane de Poitiers to a high degree of confidence,” maintain the specialists. “We believe that she drank gold … . The high concentrations of gold in her hair indicate the she could have died of chronic intoxication with gold.”192

Passing from myth to reality and then into art, the gold went through a process of transmutation from the antlers of Diana’s white stag into the body of Diane de Poitiers, settling into the horns of the Anet statue and finally landing in the form of a gold anodized antenna on the rooftop of a building in Philadelphia. Invisible network of significations.

Etymologically, the word antenna derives from Greek (to stretch out or forth) and Latin (horns of insects or ends of sail-yards).193 Biological antennae are sensory organs that reach out to feel the environment, determine orientation, and make sense of the surroundings. The extensions of the legendary stag and those of the modern Guild House antenna perform similar functions: they situate and anchor the body that carries them in its particular setting, making it aware of its context. The gold transgresses time and space and perhaps reveals the unspoken

189 Edward N. O’Neil, “Cynthia and the Moon,” Classical Philology 53, No. 1 (January 1958): 1. 190 Charlier et alli, “Fatal Alchemy,” 1402. 191 Charlier et alli, “Fatal Alchemy,” 1402. 192 Charlier et alli, “Fatal Alchemy,” 1403. 193 Oxford English Dictionary. 190

desire of the architect to re-locate his “ugly and ordinary” building from Philadelphia into a mythical time.194

Golden wires. After referencing the Anet castle, Venturi remarks that the antenna on the Guild House can be interpreted abstractly “as a statue in the manner of Lippold.”195 Richard Lippold (1915-2002) was an American artist who studied industrial design, but was also engaged in music and dance. (Musician John Cage was, in fact, one of his close friends.) As Lippold contributed to a re-birth of the Constructivist tradition in the United States, his “constructivist- inspired wire sculptures were characteristic of a form of soft modernism.196 He collaborated with several modernist architects and artists and was an artist-in-residence at the famous Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1948.197

In the 1960s, Lippold was commissioned to create a sculpture for the Vanderbilt Avenue lobby of the headquarters of Pan American World Airways in New York (Figure 2.55.). With Walter Gropius and Peter Belluschi among the architects, the Pan Am building, was an International Style skyscraper designed for a company that aimed to project to the world an image of modernity and progress.198 In a letter to Lippold from 1960, Gropius described his idea of the final sculpture as “a large metal screen” with “a large globe designed as an abstract” in front of it.199 Lippold’s intention, however, was that the sculpture would “provide a means for tranquil contemplation in a center of unordered movement, thus being party to the concurrence of law and chance.”200 In the final piece entitled Flight, he used two materials: “a high-carat gold over bronze for the globe and star, and stainless steel for all the silver-colored elements.”201 Reaching out into the space was more than a metaphor for Pan Am, a building that had been built making use of “air rights” – the right to build in the air space above an existing structure where

194 “Ugly and ordinary” was Philip Johnson’s description of Venturi and Scott Brown’s entry for the 1967 Brighton Beach Housing Competition. (Deborah Fausch, The Context of Meaning is Everyday Life: Venturi and Scott Brown’s Theories of Architecture and Urbanism, Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 1999, 214.) 195 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 116. 196 Herve Vanel, “John Cage’s Muzak-Plus: The Fu(rni)ture of Music,” Representations 102, No. 1 (Spring 2008): 109. 197 "Richard Lippold." Encyclopedia of World Biography. 2004. Encyclopedia.com. Accessed June 16, 2014, http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3404703910.html 198 Vanel, “John Cage’s Muzak-Plus: The Fu(rni)ture of Music,” 109. 199 Vanel, “John Cage’s Muzak-Plus: The Fu(rni)ture of Music,” 110. 200 Richard Lippold, “Projects for Pan Am and Philharmonic,” Art in America 50, No. 2 (Summer 1962): 55. 201 Lippold, “Projects for Pan Am and Philharmonic,” 54. 191

the new construction rests upon the old one.202 The new Pan Am building was standing atop Grand Central Station (Figure 2.56.).

Gold features extensively in Lippold’s work. His Variation with a Sphere, No.10: The Sun (1953-1956) was a composition of gold-filled wires The Trinity Crucifix at the Church of St. Gregory the Great in Rhode Island (1960), was made of gold plate wire, stainless steel wire, aluminum and silver gilt. Gold wire was also the medium of the Bird of Paradise #3 (1964) Lippold continued to explore gold as a medium even in his later works: the Ad Astra sculpture in front of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC (1976) is made of gold-colored polished stainless steel Ex Stasis on the campus of Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1988) is crafted from stainless steel, anodized aluminum, and gold-plated cables (Figure 2.57.).

When Venturi brings forth the reference to Lippold’s abstract sculptures, he tacitly engages not just their form, but also their media. The antenna on the Guild House brings into the same horizon the golden horns of Diana’s stag and the golden wires of Lippold’s artwork – technology, mythology, and abstract art. These various devices sense and make sense of the environment, and also perform a balancing exercise through anchoring or suspending their own golden bodies. Which brings us to the next question:

What does a TV antenna do? It acts as a medium that captures the waves and translates them into images, and it is, in fact, what makes television (i.e. remote vision) work. It is an instrument made of multiple conductors of different lengths that correspond to the wavelength range that the antenna is supposed to receive. Antennas are placed either indoors, on a TV set, or outdoors, on a building, and receive broadcast television signals which are then transferred to the TV set. Conventionally, antennas are classified in indoor (dipole or loop antennas) and outdoor (yagi and log period antennas).

Golden boredom. The office of Venturi and Rauch paid considerable attention to the “antenna” on the Guild House, which was not, in fact, a functional one. It was neither a ‘ready- made’ taken from a catalogue, nor a conventional antenna. It had been carefully designed in the office, based on precise specifications. Following Venturi’s rule of both-and, it was both an

202 Eugene J. Morris, “Air Rights Are ‘Fertile Soil’,” The Urban Lawyer 1, No. 3 (Fall 1969): 247. 192

interior, and an exterior antenna that merged the two typologies together, and therefore as one looked at it, one was both inside, and outside the house. In a frontal view from afar, the circular piece at the bottom appeared flat, just like the circular element of an indoor antenna. The design specifications indicated that this part was a “6’ parabolic antenna 3090” and its section was convex (Figure 2.58.).203 As the eye moved from the bottom of the building upward, the “antenna” centered on the vertical axis of symmetry of the façade signaled the dissolution of the bulky non-structural column on the ground floor into the thin, white non-bearing wall, and further into a light non-functional metal structure. Sitting atop the white base like a TV set on a stand, the Guild House turned into a giant television screen for the city. The façade became an X-ray, the building a giant TV screen and the passer-by, a spectator. As 5:4 was the proportion of the first rectangular television screens, this was roughly the proportion of the brick wall of the main elevation of the Guild House.

In his critique of the three forms of modern entertainment in the first decades of the 20th century – advertisement, films and radio – Siegfried Kracauer described the constant exposure of the modern man to news and events from all around the world as a “species of antennal fate.”204 This constant background noise, Kracauer argued, which in itself can be utterly boring and irrelevant, denies one the right to privacy and personal boredom.205 The aerial on the Guild House foresees the “antennal destiny” of architecture, which in the coming decades will increasingly rely on the latest trends and the most recent fashions.

The side elevation showed the antenna carefully aligned with the façade of the building, and construction documents specified how the steel rod was to be anchored into the slab (Figure 2.59.). This alignment of the antenna with the façade would have never been perceived from a distance and whether the aerial was recessed from the front façade or not was a detail that passers-by would most likely have missed. The construction documents, however, indicated the importance of the aerial being flush with the building as a means to achieve a flatness carried on at different scales of the design (Figure 2.59).

203 VSB Collection 225.II.A. box.2. folder 6104.08. 204 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 333. 205 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 333. 193

A TV antenna signals the collapse of time and distances. On TV, far-away events are brought near, and follow in quick succession one after another. As viewers watch TV, they expect images to change, vary and constantly move. Television is where the impatience of the age resides. The Guild House carries the seeds of an impatient architecture that doesn’t allow time and the eye to settle in. As soon as the latter begins to slide on the flat surface of the façade it quickly moves away in search for something else, another piece of information, perhaps a different building. Surfaces are flat to allow the unobstructed and quick movement of the eye. Flatness as a condition of speed is translated into construction details of surfaces that are flush and aligned with each other to ensure a smooth and rapid transition. The effect of “the dark brown brick walls with double-hung windows” is not only a play of scale between their unusual big size, and the traditional row houses in Philadelphia, as Venturi explained.206 It is also a glorified flat surface. Possible stains of weathering would pass unnoticed on the dark surface, without visually interrupting the smoothness of the façade. In a hand-written account of the project, Venturi described the north façade as “flat.”207 The balcony railings are perforated steel plate painted black, flush with the plane of the façade thus ensuring flatness despite the change in materials. The “polished black granite” of the entrance column highlights not only the symbolic role of the heavy post,208 but also its restless sleekness. As one could spin around the column in endless motions, the pillar destabilizes rather than anchors the building into the ground. In a construction document that details the sign indicating the construction year (1965), it is specified that a corner stone has to have “this end polished.”209 The sign (which eventually did not find a place on the façade) was designed with particular attention to the construction of the letters: hand-written notes on the drawings specified that the interior curves of the numbers were to be elliptical, not circular.210 Along with the antenna, this unsettling Baroque ballet of curves and counter-curves contributed to the sense of movement and speed contained in the new media so happily embraced by architects and lay people alike.

The anodized gold TV antenna on the Guild House foresees more radical approaches in Venturi’s future work. As we have already seen, his fascination with screens big and small,

206 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 116. 207 VSB Collection 225.II.A. box.4. folder 6104.41. 208 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 116. 209 VSB Collection 225.II.A. box.2. folder 6104.23. 210 VSB Collection 225.II.A. box.2. folder 6104.23. 194

projections and moving images becomes a design strategy in the (unbuilt) entry for the National Football Hall of Fame competition from 1967 where panels, screens and billboards move, flip, rotate, and alter the face of architecture. For Venturi, the medium of architecture resides in skin- deep, flat surfaces that contain provisions for constant change and entertainment.

This approach echoes Marshall McLuhan’s famous ‘the medium is the message.’211 McLuhan understood media as extensions of the human body and its sensory perceptions. He argued that the medium does not represent anything, does not stand for anything else, but that it simply is. There is no other content or meaning beyond the medium itself. Alluding to the jargon of teenagers who began to use the word cool instead of their parents’ hot to show that something had value, McLuhan classified media in hot and cool. Hot media heightened one particular sense in “high definition,” allowed for less participation of the audience and referred to those media that used to be exhilarating for the generation of the parents: radio, movie and photography. Cool media, on the other hand, engaged all senses, required the participation of the audience who was invited to complete the message, and included, among other forms of communication, the most exciting invention of the time: television. As surprising as it might seem today, McLuhan saw in television a deep potential for interaction and engagement with the human body: “TV will not work as a background. It engages you. You have to be with it.”212 Moreover, he made the argument that television is a haptic medium:

The TV image requires each instant that we “close” the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile, because tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated contact of skin and object.213

He derived his idea that ‘the medium is the message’ from Cubism, which, he argued, had posited it for the first time with the intention of collapsing time and space. For McLuhan, the possibility to identify the medium with the message became reality only with the advent of electric speed, an event reflected also in architecture:214 He maintained that Frank Lloyd

211 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 7-21. 212 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 312. 213 Ibid., 314. 214 “…cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole. Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message. … Before the electric speed and total field, it 195

Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, designed on a spiral, concentric basis, “is a redundant form inevitable to the electric age, in which the concentric pattern is imposed by the instant quality, and overlay in depth of electric speed.”215

The aerial on the Guild House carried the promise of speed and change. At a time when technological progress transformed into reality the aesthetics of speed imagined by Italian Futurists at the beginning of the century, television made possible another secret dream: as one stood still in their own living room, the world was changing right in front of their eyes and the spectator entertained the illusion that they had control over it. To the seniors, to the bed ridden, to the bored homemakers, television offered the potential for erstwhile inaccessible amusement and distraction. When Venturi described the antenna as a symbol of the elderly “who spend so much time looking at T.V.” he was inadvertently revealing the latent discomfort of the age, not only of the aged, with slow pace and unhurried rhythms. Anxious to keep moving, the world was flying away from boredom without realizing that the faster it ran away from it, the quicker it spun within the same tighter and tighter circle. As the press release proudly stated, television and a flexible construction system offered the residents of the Guild House the tools “to relieve monotony.” But wasn’t television providing the trap into deeper and more profound boredom? Wasn’t Venturi’s antenna indicating the shift toward an architecture of changing surfaces that, much like a TV screen, would rely not on materiality, but on virtual signals? Wasn’t the aerial pointing, in fact, to the exact opposite of what the architect had intended? Didn’t the fake antenna stand for a fake escape from boredom? If the “real” antennas were receiving television signals, wasn’t the “fake” antenna capturing the unseen waves of boredom?

Standing between the golden horns of Diana’s stag and the golden wires of Lippold’s sculptures, the golden antenna on the Guild House embodies the modern myth of escaping boredom through distraction. All these ‘sensing devices’ seize the invisible waves and networks of meaning present in our environment. If the movies and television series of the 1950s and 1960s were enthralled with the idea of the universe sending us signals, terrestrial architecture was gradually losing its depth becoming, instead, a shallow, flat, and skin-deep screen.

was not obvious that the medium is the message. The message, it seemed, was the “content,” as people used to ask what a painting was about.” (McLuhan, Understanding Media, 13) 215 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 26. 196

Conclusions.

This chapter has shown that Venturi’s (unaccounted for) upbringing as a Quaker has discreetly shaped his architectural theories. Some of his seemingly contradictory positions (such as the emphasis on flatness, on the one hand, and the preference for excess, on the other) could be deciphered through the lens of Quaker ethics and aesthetics. My speculative readings of three of his early projects show that, despite Venturi’s attempt to flatten meaning through over- explicating his design and thinking process, meaning is never exhausted. Every description is always a thick description.

197

Chapter 2. Figures.

Figure 2.1. Venturi and Rauch, Plan of Vanna Venturi House, 1966. Public domain.

Figure 2.2. Venturi and Rauch, Cope and Lippincott, Plan of Guild House, 1960-1963. Public domain.

Figure 2.3. Venturi and Short, Plan of North Penn Visiting Nurse Association, 1960. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. 198

Figure 2.4. Interior of the Arch Street Friends Meeting House, Phildelphia. Public domain.

Figure 2.5. Venturi and Rauch, Cope and Lippincott, Guild House: sign on the façade, 1960-1963. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.6. Venturi and Short, Grand’s Restaurant: sign on the façade, 1962. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

199

Figure 2.7. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, National Football Hall of Fame: sign on the façade, 1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.8. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Franklin Court, 1976. Public domain.

Figure 2.9. Edward Hicks, Painting in the Peaceable Kingdoms Series, 1825-1830. Public domain.

Figure 2.10. Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom of the Branch, 1825. Public domain.

200

Figure 2.11. Edward Hicks, Detail of The Peaceable Kingdoms with Quakers Bearing Banner, 1826. Public domain.

Figure 2.12. Quaker Silhouettes, 18th-19th centuries. Public domain.

Figure 2.13. Gilles-Louis Chretien, Drawing for a physiognotrace, 1786. Public domain.

Figure 2.14. Albums of Quaker Silhouettes. Public domain.

201

Figure 2.15. Venturi and Scott Brown, Knoll Chairs, c. 1984. Public domain.

Figure 2.16. Venturi and Scott Brown, The Queen Ann Chair, c. 1984. Public domain.

Figure 2.17. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, National Football Hall of Fame competition entry, 1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.18. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Extension of the Allen Art Museum, Oberlin College, 1973. Public domain. 202

Figure 2.19. Metal structure of a contemporary billboard. Public domain.

Figure 2.20. Interactive display for Johnson and Johnson’s Sundown line of tanning products. Public domain.

Figure 2.21. Still frame from Leave It to Beaver! Public domain.

Figure 2.22. Still frame from Leave It to Beaver! Public domain. 203

Figure 2.23. Scented billboard in Mooresville, NC. Public domain.

Figure 2.24. Ed Ruscha, Actual Size, 1962. Public domain.

Figure 2.25. Contemporary billboard. Public domain.

Figure 2.26. Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966. Public domain.

204

Figure 2.27. Robert Venturi, Thesis Project: Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.28. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, National Football Hall of Fame competition entry, 1967. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.29. Venturi and Rauch, Cope and Lippincott, Guild House, 1963-1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. 205

Figure 2.30. Robert Venturi, School project for a Roman Catholic Church, undated. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.31. Robert Venturi, Thesis Project: Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.32. Robert Venturi, Thesis Project: Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

206

Figure 2.33. Robert Venturi, Thesis Project: Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.34. Robert Venturi, Thesis Project: Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.35. Robert Venturi, Thesis Project: Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. 207

Figure 2.36. Interior of a contemporary Quaker Meeting House. Public domain.

Figure 2.37. Robert Venturi, Thesis Project: Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.38. Robert Venturi, Thesis Project: Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

208

Figure 2.39. Robert Venturi, Thesis Project: Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.40. Robert Venturi, Thesis Project: Chapel for the Episcopal Academy, 1953. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.41. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Episcopal Academy Chapel, 2008. Public domain.

209

Figure 2.42. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Episcopal Academy Chapel, 2008. Public domain.

Figure 2.43. Venturi and Rauch, Scott Brown, FDR Memorial Park Competition, 1960. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.44. Venturi and Rauch, Scott Brown, Philadelphia Fairmount Park, 1964. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

210

Figure 2.45. Venturi and Rauch, Gerod Clark and Arthur Jones, Copley Square Competition Entry, 1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.46. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, National Football Hall of Fame competition entry, 1967. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.47. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, National Football Hall of Fame competition entry, 1967. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

211

Figure 2.48. Still frame from the sitcom My Favorite Martian, 1963-66. Public domain.

Figure. 2.49. Opening frame of the sitcom Bewitched, 1964-1972. Public domain.

Figure. 2.50. Richard Hamilton, Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Home so Different, so Appealing?, 1954. Public domain.

Figure 2.51. Venturi and Rauch, Cope and Lippincott, Guild House, 1963-1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

212

Figure 2.52. Venturi and Rauch, Cope and Lippincott, Guild House, 1963-1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.53. Philibert de l’Orme, Anet Castle, 1547 to 1552. Public domain.

Figure 2.54. Philibert de l’Orme, Anet Castle, 1547 to 1552. Public domain.

Figure 2.55. Richard Lippold, Installation for the lobby of the Pan American World Airways, New York, 1963. Public domain. 213

Figure 2.56. MetLife Building, formerly Pan American World Airways, New York, 1963. Public domain.

Figure 2.57. Richard Lippold: Variation with a Sphere, No.10: The Sun (1953-56); Bird of Paradise #3 (1964); Ad Astra (1976); Ex Stasis (1988). Public domain.

Figure 2.58. Venturi and Rauch, Cope and Lippincott, Drawings for the antenna on the Guild House, 1963-1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 2.59. Venturi and Rauch, Cope and Lippincott, Drawings for the antenna on the Guild House, 1963-1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. 214

Second Interlude: Boredom and (Day)dreaming

Modernity, and with it architectural representation, largely assumes the space of clarity and straightforward answers where riddles are resolved, inversions are turned into mere mirrors, and ghosts in the daylight vanish. The modernist machine devours and turns into straight lines any deviation from the norm (Figure II.1., II.2). As architects, how can we claim the imprecise territory of visual riddles through the even more imprecise tools of moods and atmospheres?

Riddles exist everywhere. In tales and folklore, riddles constitute rites of passage for young men, riddles are presented to a suitor before the girl is entrusted to him in marriage, and riddles often accompany the deceased on their last journey. From times immemorial, all cultures have employed riddles as cognitive operations1 that describe the indescribable through metaphors. “The very nature indeed of a riddle is this, to describe a fact in an impossible combination of words (which cannot be done with the real names for things, but can be with their metaphorical substitutes)…,” wrote Aristotle in The Poetics.2 Around mid-twentieth century, a structuralist definition emerged in linguistics and folklore studies: “A riddle is a traditional verbal expression which contains one or more descriptive elements, a pair of which may be in opposition; the referent of the elements is to be guessed.”3 A more nuanced approach states that “riddles play with boundaries, but ultimately to affirm them (like a child playing with mud to find and define the boundaries of his body.) Shared characteristics between categories are a threat to the distinctiveness of the categories; riddles examine those things that are shared and pinpoint those that divide.”4

As a central tactic in the process of riddling, inversion is the folding of two apparently conflicting realities into each other. In one of the oldest riddles in the history of Western civilization, the Sphinx collapses and inverts opposite principles: male and female, sun and moon, day and night, light and shadow, life and death. Inversions call into question too easy

1 Elli Köngäs Maranda, “Riddles and Riddling: An Introduction,” The Journal of American Folklore 89, No. 352 (June 1976): 127. 2 Robert A. Georges and Alan Dundes, “Toward a Structural Definition of the Riddle,” The Journal of American Folklore 76, No. 300 (April-June 1963): 111. 3 Ibid., 113. 4 Köngäs Maranda, “Riddles and Riddling: An Introduction,” 131. 215

dichotomies. It is during this process and within this thick space that fruitful and unexpected associations come to life.

Inversions

I will examine visual tactics of retrieving riddles and inversions in architectural representation through boredom and daydreaming as two ostensibly opposed moods. A pathological condition (Otto Fenichel),5 a mood conducive to philosophy (Martin Heidegger),6 “the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience” (Walter Benjamin),7 “a kind of bliss that is almost unearthly” (Sigfried Kracauer),8 the concept of boredom has emerged and been intertwined with modernity.

Defined as a “series of thoughts or yearnings that pleasantly distract one’s attention, an idle fantasy or a vain hope,”9 daydreaming, like contemplation or reverie, has been associated with creativity and imagination. A sense of impracticality and distance from “real” problems or “real” solutions underlies the act of daydreaming. Earlier meanings associate it with unrealistic hopes and dreams of “castle-building in the air.”10 Through daydreaming, the subject can activate her imagination and transport herself to another time or place.11

Daydreaming and boredom share a sense of disengagement from the present, a certain absent-mindedness, an idleness, and aspirations for impractical pursuits. Having my starting point in this common territory between two seemingly opposed moods, I will show the

5 Otto Fenichel, The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel (New York, W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1953). 6 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 7 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 106. 8 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 334. 9 Oxford English Dictionary, entry daydream: “A series of thoughts or yearnings that distract one's attention (esp. pleasantly) from the present; a reverie. Hence: an idle fantasy or vain hope, typically concerning ambitions of happiness or success.” 10 A use tracked to 1816, suggests that “Many, particularly young persons, .. stray in the regions of fancy, called castle-building, or daydreaming.” (Oxford English Dictionary, entry daydreaming) 11 Oxford English Dictionary, entry to daydream: “trans. (refl.). With into, to. To imagine oneself in another place, time period, etc., as part of a daydream.” 216

construction of spatial riddles through the folding of boredom into daydreaming in two drawings by Saul Steinberg.

The first drawing I will ponder over is an unpublished sketch, dated 1943-1944 (Figure II.3.). In this drawing. Steinberg portrays himself in a sparsely furnished room, populated with ghost-like silhouettes: “Decorations I made in a room (U.S. Army Hotel) where I’ve been living for a few days. Glad when I moved,”12 he wrote.

After having spent the first eighteen years of his life in Bucharest, Steinberg lived in Italy between 1933 and 1941, where he earned an architecture degree at the Regio Politecnico in Milan. By 1941, he was sought by Mussolini’s police as a stateless Jew with no rights to remain in Italy. A series of immigration ordeals followed and through the help of friends and family, he eventually landed on American soil. Shortly after his arrival, he was drafted in the US Army and in 1943 was deployed first to China, and later to Algiers (via India), Naples, and Rome.13 From 1944 to 1945, The New Yorker magazine published ten portfolios of drawings that recorded Steinberg’s time in the Army. A roommate during the time spent in China recalled that after leaving their shared room for an hour, he came back to a lifesize bar that Steinberg had drawn on the walls: “a table, two chairs, a bottle of whiskey and two glasses, near a window which looked down on Times Square.”14

The second drawing I will examine shows a man watching TV in bed, in an highly decorated bedroom (Figure II.4.). In the summer of 1950, Steinberg traveled to Hollywood to provide the drawing hand of Gene Kelly’s character in An American in Paris. He quit the first day after an argument with the director Vincente Minelli, but stayed in California for the next three months.15 The outcome of his stay on the West Coast was the portfolio titled “The Coast,” which occupies five pages in the January 27, 1951 issue of The New Yorker. The drawing I am

12 Joel Smith, Illuminations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 13 Joel Smith, Illuminations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 31. Upon arriving in the United States, in August 1942 Steinberg was classified as “available for immediate military service” and became a consultant for the Graphics Division of the Office of War Information. With the help of friends, he received a commission as an ensign in the US Naval and became part of the Office for Strategic Services. His skills were used in the preparation of pictorial propaganda and he continued to make drawings of the places and environments he was living in and sent them to The New Yorker. (Saul Steinberg: Chronology. http://saulsteinbergfoundation.org/chronology/ Accessed March 15, 2018) 14 Smith, Illuminations, 31. 15 Joel Smith, Steinberg at The New Yorker (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2005), 76. 217

looking at is part of this series. In January 1951, Steinberg wrote in his journal: “America looks to California the way Europe looks to America.”16

Through the inversion of boredom and daydreaming, the two drawings propose spatial riddles, which, unlike verbal riddles that have an answer, construct, instead, a thick space of ambiguity. The drawings are architectural not because they foreground architectural interiors, but because they invite us to occupy the space by constructing a network of shared complicities between the viewing subject and the architect-artist. Marco Frascari has argued that Steinberg, like Filarete, ties “the place-time of drawing in bundles of practices within the horizon of a region. … These drawings create specific time-place sections through habitual social practices. Their details systematically bind specific locations through the overlapping of time-horizons.”17 In Steinberg and Filarete’s drawings, Marco writes, “transpires an embodied cultural calling- into-being of experience.”18

Noontime

Medieval Christian monks feared acedia, boredom’s ancestor, as the “demon of noontide” that threatened to surreptitiously take over their vigilance and alertness in the lazy hours of midday, the time of stillness without shadows. Indifference and apathy induce a non- caring state, a mode of being oblivious to the present and the immediate world, and drive one into emptiness. Analyzing ennui in Western literature, literary critic Reinhard Kuhn noted that when the demon of noontide does not stifle creativity, it paradoxically “can and often does induce efforts to fill the void that it hollows out.”19 Boredom, ennui or Langeweille sometimes inverts itself into the pleasant mood of daydreaming. Steinberg’s drawings make present the imprecise territory between boredom and daydreaming, questioning the dichotomy between the two conditions and operating, instead, at their intersection. In various instances, Steinberg has detailed his relationship with boredom, which he viewed as the catalyst of imagination: “The life

16 Ibid., 76. 17 Marco Frascari, “Horizons at the Drafting Table,” Chora (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007): 183-184. 18 Ibid., 187. 19 Kuhn cited in Robert D. Spector, book review, “Reinhard Kuhn: The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature,” World Literature Today 51, no. 3 (Summer 1977): 507. 218

of the creative man is led, directed, and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.” In his personal notes he elaborated on the role of boredom in his work: if “I get slightly bored with my work, I don’t find the excitement, the real excitement, now this boredom tells me something, it’s a message … I have to invent new things.”20

The inversion of boredom and daydreaming activates imagination. In 1790, Xavier de Maistre, an army officer better known as a writer, was confined to a forty-two-day arrest in his room in the aftermath of a duel. The outcome of his involuntary sojourn was the book Journey around My Room, a small volume that describes the imaginary travels spawned by the mundane objects in his chamber. A parody of the eighteenth century Grand Tour, the book inverts the grandiose narratives of extraordinary adventures with the more modest, but not less engaging, stories of the everyday. Constrained by physical boundaries, he turns his boredom into contemplation: “A nice fire, books, pens; how many resources there are against boredom! And what a pleasure it is, too, to forget your books and your pens, and instead poke your fire, succumbing to a gentle contemplation or arranging a few rhymes to amuse your friends.”21 Like de Maistre, Steinberg folds boredom into contemplation by examining the mundane and ordinary things around him.

Writing about one’s memory of their childhood home, philosopher Gaston Bachelard describes children’s inversion of boredom and daydreaming as a catalyst of imagination: “What special depth there is in a child’s daydream! And how happy the child who really possesses his moments of solitude! It is a good thing, it is even salutary, for a child to have periods of boredom, for him to learn to know the dialectics of exaggerated play and causeless, pure boredom.”22 Our memory collapses boredom and daydreaming in re-constructing the dream homes of our childhood: “Centers of boredom, centers of solitude, centers of daydream group together to constitute the oneiric house which is more lasting than the scattered memories of our birthplace.”23

In the early decades of the twentieth century, cultural critic Sigfried Kracauer has recognized the modern separation between work and leisure as one of the main sources of

20 UNCAT MSS 126 Box 100. 21 Xavier de Maistre, A Journey around My Room, trans. Andrew Brown (Richmond, UK: Alma Classics, 2017), 8. 22 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 16. 23 Ibid., 17. 219

boredom. This dichotomy has fractured people’s time into active and passive hours and so, fearing the void of having nothing to do, individuals resort to facile forms of entertainment. Quiet Sunday afternoons engender a stifling boredom reflected in the eerie stillness of decorative miniature glass figures, frozen in their porcelain silhouettes.24 Instead of falling captive to this deadening silence, Kracauer proposes to turn boredom into contemplation:

If, however, one has the patience, the sort of patience specific to legitimate boredom, then one experiences a kind of bliss that is almost unearthly. A landscape appears in which colorful peacocks strut about, and images of people suffused w soul come into view. And look – your own soul is likewise swelling, and in ecstasy you name what have always lacked: the great passion.25

Steinberg’s drawings occupy the temporal and spatial interval described by de Masitre, Bachelard, and Kracauer, where boredom and daydreaming fold into each other and activate one’s imagination. Steinberg’s techniques of fabricating this riddle involve the construction of boundaries, specific bodily postures, and, deriving from the first two, a particular relationship of the self with the world.

Spatial Boundaries

Looking up, with his eyes closed, a man is lying in bed, arms folded under his head. Watching TV with his eyes behind shades, a man is lying in bed, arms folded under his head. Are they bored or are they dreaming?

In the first drawing, Steinberg sketches two versions of himself in a minimally furnished room, an army hotel room, as he remembers. (Figure II.3.) One of the two Steinbergs is lying in bed with the hands folded under his head and looking up, while the other one appears as an oversized specter looking down at his alter ego. The scene appears both alienating and nostalgic as it brings together solid realities and fluid fantasies, an undesirable present and characters from a long-lost past. The edges of the room seem ordinary and precisely defined: walls, ceiling, hardwood floor, a door, and a window. However, another type of boundary doubles the physical

24 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 334. 25 Ibid., 334. 220

limitations. Two ghosts “spill” into the room, re-imagining its limits and entering into a conversation with man lying on his back. A horizontal specter sweeps the floor and gently holds one of the shoes belonging to the character in bed. A vertical specter occupies the wall, leaking upward onto the ceiling. She is scratching her head with the pensive gesture that indicates someone trying to figure out a riddle. Occupying the perimeter of the space – walls, floor, and part of the ceiling – the ghosts construct fluid boundaries and indicate that the room is both real and imagined. The generic and non-descript army hotel room folds into a warm and welcoming oneiric room, perhaps one of the rooms in the childhood house on Strada Palas.

Often described as the mood experienced by Bovary-ian wives confined to their domesticity, boredom inverts itself into daydreaming when the hard-edged interior becomes fluid and offers a gateway to imagination. It is within this depth turned inside-out that ghosts appear. Known for her casts that solidify and make visible the invisible space, British artist Rachel Whiteread gained international recognition through her celebrated piece Ghost.26 It casts the interior of a nineteenth-century Victorian living room and bring into presence its specific features: floor boards, ceiling molding, the soot on the fireplace, a door, and a window. The artist confessed that it was only when she looked at the inverted position of the light switch that she realized she was having the perspective from inside the wall. She was occupying the body of a ghost (Figure II.5.).

In the drawing from The Coast series, Steinberg puts his protagonist in a heavily ornate interior (Figure II.4.). A baldachin hanging from the ceiling and an intricate piece of heraldry, as well as an oversized shell-shaped headboard and decorated lamps suggest a fake sense of sophistication. Steinberg is mocking the pretense of elegance – not only does the character look content in this eclectic interior, but he is wearing sunglasses indoors. With a history going back to brocade and other precious fabrics brought from foreign lands, the (fake) baldachin (or baldacco, the Italian word for Baghdad27) also evokes something else: the world of fantasies hovering above one’s head when they are daydreaming. Fantasies come to life as phantasms that dwell in the room. But isn’t the TV cancelling out the reverie and bringing back the boredom?

26 Created in 1990, Ghost is currently part of the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. 27 Oxford English Dictionary, entry baldachin: Etymology – Baldacco, Italian form of Bagdad, the city in Asia where the material was made. 221

At a closer inspection, these apparently hyper-realistic drawings make one wonder: what is real and what is imagined? A specter is gently holding a shoe, but ultimately both the ghost and the shoe are drawn figures. A man wearing sunglasses is lying in bed– while indoors, maybe he dreams of wandering outside, so where is he really? “Drawing is more truthful than reality,” Steinberg wrote, “because reality is undoubtedly invented, whereas drawing is faithful. It is made according to the rules of drawing.”

As long as specters make their appearance and occupy the perimeter of these spaces, boundaries are no longer dense, but porous and elastic. Spaces with permeable boundaries blur the distinction between boredom and daydreaming, upside and down, inside and out.

Bodily Posture

Looking up, with his eyes closed, a man is lying in bed, arms folded under his head. Watching TV with his eyes behind shades, a man is lying in bed, arms folded under his head. Are they bored or are they dreaming?

In ennui as in daydreaming, the head is heavy with the weight of thoughts or, on the contrary, as light as the void inside. The bored, as well as the contemplative, abandon their body to loose postures. They rest their jaw on one hand in an unbalanced pose and gaze toward nowhere (Figure II.6.). Sometimes, they lie horizontally with the head comfortably balanced on both arms and gaze up (Figure II.7.). Longing either for a glorified past or for an imagined future, they never live in the present. The couple in Walter Sickert’s L’Ennui is bored (Figure II.8.). Or perhaps contemplative…? The woman is looking to the left, as if toward the past, while the man is looking to the right, as if toward the future. The bored and the contemplative never look you in the eye, and that makes it hard to distinguish between them and decipher the riddle of their thoughts. Disengaged from the each other and from the viewer, both characters in the painting look elsewhere and dream of being elsewhere. The stuffed bird in the glass cage in the foreground recalls the stillness of Kracauer glass miniatures. They capture the essence of boredom: a body held captive within the invisible confines of a glass box.

222

Both boredom and daydreaming claim domestic, familiar spaces, where bodies relax and lose the tightness of the upright posture. “Ennui, it has been said, is a ‘domestic demon.’”28 The tedium of everyday life induces the uniform, the shapeless, but also the multiform, the excess – of ornament, of color, of objects, of furniture.29 Boredom and contemplation are inward-looking, private moods. They belong to an inner world, often depicted as the space between an interior and an exterior seen through a window or reflected – as inversion – through a mirror. The refuge of the interior offers an alternative to tedium.

In Steinberg’s drawings, both bodies are reclining. Thus, the body becomes a horizon line full of possibilities. While standing and sitting are in a continuous interaction, lying down offers different readings. Joseph Rykwert has remarked the affinity between standing up and the primordial stretching of the body at birth.30 The act of sitting is both a form of surrendering to fatigue and a coming-closer to the earth. At the same time, it often indicates a form of privilege clearly expressed in relation to others who are standing. Neither standing (as if ready for action), nor sitting (as if resting, but still alert), the passive posture of lying down allows a range of different futures to unfold: boredom, dreaming, daydreaming, awakening, sickness or even death are all possible. Unpredictably, the protagonist might sit up, stand up, roll on the side, move or simply fall asleep. Playing within this ambiguous territory, Steinberg does not give one straight answer, but rather thickens the spatial riddle of the inversion between boredom and daydreaming.

The Self and the World

Looking up, with his eyes closed, a man is lying in bed, arms folded under his head. Watching TV with his eyes behind shades, a man is lying in bed, arms folded under his head. Are they bored or are they dreaming?

“Happiness enjoys itself completely only if it doubles its own image in the mirror of reflection. Happiness wants to be both subject and object: the subject of its object and the object

28 Georges Teyssot, “Boredom and Bedroom: The Suppression of the Habitual,” Assemblage, No. 30 (August 1996): 48. 29 Ibid., 49. 30 Joseph Rykwert, “The Upright Posture – A Question of Method.” 223

of its subject. There is no happiness if one is alone; happiness must be shared, it needs a public.”31

Marco Frascari has written about the power of architecture to create a vita beata (a happy existence) by merging visible (architectural and human) bodies and invisible body images.32 Steinberg’s protagonists imagine a happy existence beyond the boundaries of their existing conditions. Through boredom and daydreaming as solitary acts, the characters are simultaneously connected with and disengaged from, the larger world.

A recurrent theme in Steinberg’s work, the television appears to bring the spectator into the world or rather bring the world closer. In fact, the subject is detached and cut off from a world perceived through the mediation of the television screen, where people turn into specters with expressionless grins (Figure II.9.). Paradoxically, the drawn ghosts appear more “real” than the smiling people on the screen who lack personality and display a fake, uniform and meaningless smile. While the latter construct an artificial and illusory relationship with the world, the former engage the memory and imagination of the subject.

In the middle of an overflow of “stuff,” a faint smile is the sign of a man’s satisfaction with the self and the situation (Figure II.4.). The Spartan interior does not make the other man happy, but his imagination spills onto and inhabits the bare walls (Figure II.3.). Who is bored and who is daydreaming?

The man lying in bed and his spectral alter ego watching him are reflections of each other. This inversion can only exist in the space of inwardness and introspection, where one becomes a flâneur in his own room and discovers, just as Xavier de Maistre, the bliss of tedium. It is within the intimate space of domesticity that ennui and daydreaming are intrinsically connected and conspire toward building a vita beata.

By intertwining boredom and daydreaming in his spatial riddles, Steinberg reveals the thick space of domesticity as an instrument, rather than a machine, for living, attuned to moods and atmospheres, open to different horizons, full of dreams, as well as nightmares.

31 Teyssot, “Boredom and Bedroom: The Suppression of the Habitual,” 50. 32 Marco Frascari, “A Tradition of Architectural Figure: A Search for Vita Beata,”in Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relationship between Body and Architecture, eds. Robert Tavernor and George Dodds (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2002), 259. 224

In Steinberg’s universe, every-one and every-thing is a dreamer.

A stray dog dreams of guarding a castle, even if the castle is the Smithsonian Institution logo (Figure II.10.).

A heavy-handed-drawn cube has modernist aspirations (Figure II.11.),

… and even a banal E wishes to become a slim and distinguished French vowel (Figure II.12.).

From the enigma of the ancient Sphinx to present-day puzzles, riddles are everywhere. Just as boredom and daydreaming fold into each other through unexpected inversions, things turned upside down or inside out never stay the same. Walter Benjamin saw the inside of boredom as a lustrous and colorful silk within which we wrap ourselves when we dream.33 In his own way, through inversions, reflections, and shadows, Saul Steinberg stubbornly kept looking for a sometimes twisted, never straightforward:

33 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 106. 225

Second Interlude. Figures.

Figure II.1. Saul Steinberg. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure II.2. Saul Steinberg. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 226

Figure II.3. Saul Steinberg, Untitled sketch, 1943-1944. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure II.4. Saul Steinberg, Drawing from the portfolio “The Coast,” The New Yorker, January 27, 1951. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 227

Figure II.5. Rachel Whiteread, Ghost, 1990. Photos by the author.

Figure II.6. Saul Steinberg. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure II.7. Saul Steinberg. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

228

Figure II.8. Walter Sicker, L’Ennui, 1914. Public domain.

Figure II.9. Saul Steinberg. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure II.10. Saul Steinberg. Drawing from a series made as an artist-in-residence at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1967. 229

Figure II.11. Saul Steinberg. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure II.12. Saul Steinberg. Cover for The New Yorker, May 25, 1963. Courtesy of The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

230

Chapter 3: Between the Boring and the Interesting

Introduction

The starting point of this inquiry is the question that Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown asked in Learning from Las Vegas: “Is boring architecture interesting?”1 They pose this question at the end of the first chapter (“Ugly and Ordinary Architecture or the Decorated Shed”) of the second part of the book as a way to frame their argument for the validity of architecture as decorated shed. I find the roots of the dichotomy boring – interesting in Venturi’s theory and practice before his collaboration with Scott Brown, in his theoretical stance from Complexity and Contradiction as well as in his early projects, such as the three buildings for the town of North Canton, Ohio or the entry for the Copley Square competition. However, it is important to note that Venturi’s early use of these terms introduces nuances and ideas that will later disappear from the theoretical and practical work of the Venturi – Scott Brown team.

As we will see later in this chapter, Venturi’s play between boring and interesting in his early work suggests multiple interpretations. With an emphasis on appearance, reflected in the numerous elevation studies, architectural objects become autonomous. Scale is important in the dichotomy boring – interesting and requires different readings from far-away and close-up. Time is implicit in this mode of reading the work and suggests a lengthy rather than immediate engagement with it. This direction is quite different from the immediacy of signs and symbols that will later become one of the central ideas in the work of the team. With a focus on design strategies based on formal arrangements of elements, the boring and the interesting are no longer a matter of relationship between object and subject, but a matter of the autonomy of the work. They also turn normative, announcing what will become explicit in later writings, such as Learning from Las Vegas, namely assessing architecture and design from an aesthetic and formalist perspective.

The boring and the interesting have a long intellectual history, which this chapter will attempt to uncover. This chapter will critically look at the concept of the interesting and its

1 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 2nd edition (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1977), 101. 231

relationship with the boring as a way of understanding, through the work of Venturi and Scott Brown, its specificity within and consequences for architectural discourse. Venturi and Scott Brown have employed these concepts as distinct, opposite categories. Using irony through rhetorical arguments, they have suggested that, while their architecture appeared boring, it was in fact interesting. In doing so, they validated the latter, perhaps inadvertently, as a relevant category in the architectural discourse. Although boring and interesting are generally employed loosely, based on their intellectual history I suggest that the two are not in dialectical opposition, but become, in fact, interchangeable. Unlike the boring, which is detested, undesirable, and generally avoided, the interesting is appealing, attractive, and sought after (although at times it can have the very opposite meaning). The interesting operates through deception, its lure resides precisely in the illusion constructed through ambiguity and imprecision, through the seductive promise of a wholeness opposite to the abysmal emptiness of the boring. The boring and the interesting sit in a Janusian relationship where they represent, in fact, two sides of the same condition. Seeking the interesting engenders a relapse into the boring and thus newer and more exciting images quickly become obsolete, drawing one back into tedium and boredom.

Firstly, I will trace the intellectual history of the interesting as an aesthetic category rooted in nineteenth century philosophy and aesthetics. Although our current use of boring and interesting is rather shallow, the terms have a rich genealogy. By uncovering their deeper conceptual meanings, I aim to unveil how their use in architectural discourse shows biases and specific directions with critical consequences for theory and practice. While most of the times the term interesting stands for something loose, indeterminate, and generic, in philosophy and aesthetics, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the term has well-defined characteristics. Although Venturi and Scott Brown have distanced themselves from the postmodern label, having claimed, instead, a Modernist lineage, I propose that Venturi’s approach to architecture resonated with nineteenth century aesthetic theories on form.

Secondly, I will examine the emergence of the interesting as a distinct category primarily in the artistic and critical discourse of the 1960s, thus building the context for its use in architectural discourse. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, the architectural conversation about the boring and the interesting has paralleled and was influenced by, similar directions in visual arts. Examining Minimalism, Pop Art and Conceptual Art in the 1960s, 232

cultural theorist Sianne Ngai has argued that the use of the interesting was not a mere rhetorical trope, but opened up the possibility of a conversation and ultimately turned into an operative tool to facilitate criticism. The interesting was raised to a form of critical judgment. Also writing about visual arts in the 1960s, philosopher Karsten Harries, on the other hand, has proposed that the interesting never surpassed its aesthetic nature. Building around the interdependence of the boring and the interesting, he employed the latter as a means to formulate questions about ethics and aesthetics in architecture.

Lastly, I argue that the interesting took a different path in architecture than the critical one suggested by Ngai in the visual arts. In architectural discourse it has specific attributes that distinguishes it from other fields: (A) the emphasis on appearance as the main property of architecture results in a sense of deceit and the autonomy of the architectural object; (B) the use of combinatory techniques as design strategies generates self-referential and normative practices; (C) the bias for formal excess and overload is justified as complexity.

It was the concern with form that prevailed throughout Complexity and Contradiction – in fact, in the note to the second edition, Venturi regretted not having titled his treatise Complexity and Contradiction in Architectural Form, as it had been suggested by one of his mentors, the art and architectural historian Donald Drew Egbert.2 The focus on appearance as the defining attribute of architecture is still a current theme – it has gradually shifted from the three-dimensional forms of the second half of the twentieth century to the two-dimensional images we are confronted with today. Flatness, discussed in the previous chapter, was announcing the collapse of the multiple dimensions of architecture into a thin image. Moreover, contemporary technologies such as digital fabrication or 3D printing, which allow for endless formal iterations require a critical examination of both our criteria and our intentions. Midcentury conversations about the boring and the interesting have not turned obsolete, on the contrary, in a world submerged in fleeting images they are more relevant today than ever before.

2 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 14. 233

3.1. Learning from the interesting

As literary and cultural theorist Sianne Ngai has remarked, one of the difficulties of tackling the concept of interesting is its vague, loose, and imprecise use. Its ambiguity makes it a “plastic word,” a term that the German writer and linguist Uwe Poerksen coined in his book Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language.3 Much like Lego construction blocks, words such as “accomplishment,” “factor,” “identity,” “problem,” “process,” “quality,” “relationship,” “strategy,” “structure,” “system,” “value” Poerksen argues, can mean anything and nothing at the same time.4 They resemble metaphors as they associate two fields (the domain of science with the realm of the everyday), but are fundamentally different from them because they no longer conjure up any images.5 They fit in any context, but rule out synonyms; they have a large field of connotations, but no specific denotation; they “lack a historical dimension. … they are shallow; they are new and they don’t taste of anything.”6

Despite its current elusiveness, the concept of interesting has a history that illuminates the overlooked meanings embedded within it. It is related to, though somewhat different from, that of interest. Their etymological roots go back to the Latin interest used mainly as a verb in third person referring to something that “makes a difference, concerns, matters, is of importance.”7 Latin also gives us interest as an in between condition, a state of being in the interval: inter esse. The history of the word interest is rather obscure – while it is known that until the sixteenth century, it persisted in old French with the sense of “damage or loss,” it is unclear how it migrated to English in the fifteenth century.8 The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of interest in English as early as 1450 in relation to a “legal concern in a

3 Uwe Poerksen, Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language, trans. Jutta Mason and David Cayley (University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). 4 Ibid., 62. 5 Ibid., 99. 6 Ibid., 100-101. 7 Oxford English Dictionary, entry: interest – “Etymology: An alteration of the earlier INTERESS n., apparently after the cognate French interest (1290 in Godefroy), modern French intérêt, apparently a noun use of Latin interest it makes a difference, concerns, matters, is of importance […].” 8 Oxford English Dictionary, entry: interest – “There is much that is obscure in the history of this word, first as to the adoption of Latin interest as a noun, and secondly as to the history of the Old French sense ‘damage, loss’. No other sense is recorded in French until the 16th cent. As this was not the 15th cent. sense of English interess(e, it is curious that the form of the French word should have affected the English. The relations between the sense- development in French and English in 16–17th cent. are also far from clear.” 234

thing” and for centuries, its predominant use was associated with financial and legal issues.9 Interesting seems to have entered the English vocabulary later, with Lord Shaftesbury’s 1711 Characteristicks as something that concerns, touches, or affects; by mid-eighteenth century, the adjective was used to designate a woman’s state of being pregnant, a meaning that remained in use until mid-twentieth century.10

Interest in psychology, economy, and science. A brief excursus into the history of interest will show that the latter covers multiple fields, and has various, sometimes unrelated, connotations, from a subjective affect, to an objective term related to monetary transactions. These underlying meanings, in turn, are echoed, as we will see later, in the concept of interesting. The intellectual genealogy of interest and the interesting has multiple intertwining strands that bring together philosophy, social sciences, aesthetics, literary criticism, and visual arts. Like most of the essential terms that we employ more or less aware of their actual meaning, interest and interesting are less a matter of language and more one of culture, society, and history. As cultural critic Raymond Williams has argued, the language does not simply reflect the processes of society and history, but rather these processes take place within the language itself.11

Scholars have acknowledged the difficulty of tracing the development of interest as a “common name for a general or natural concern, and beyond this to something which first ‘naturally’ and then just ‘actually’ attracts our attention.”12 Two different meanings of the word take either (1) an objective, or (2) a subjective turn: (1) general concern or the power to attract concern (mid-eighteenth century) and (2) contemporary predominant sense of curiosity or attention, or the power to attract curiosity or attention (since mid-nineteenth century).13 These distinctions are expressed through subtle differences in terminology: disinterested has positive

9 Oxford English Dictionary, entry interest – “The fact or relation of being legally concerned; legal concern in a thing; esp. right or title to property, or to some of the uses or benefits pertaining to property; = INTERESS n. 1.” 10 Oxford English Dictionary, entry interesting – “(to be) in an interesting condition, interesting situation, interesting state: (to be) pregnant; also, to be interesting; interesting event: a birth.” 11 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 22. 12 Ibid., 172. 13 Ibid., 172. 235

connotations – impartial, unbiased; uninterested and uninteresting, on the other hand, have negative connotations – something that does not have the power to attract.14

In psychology, interest has been defined as a type of affect. In 1962, psychologist Silvan S. Tomkins brought forward the study of affect and consciousness that have long been ignored within a paradigm dominated by behaviorism and psychoanalysis.15 He argued that the mid- century shift toward examining consciousness was prompted not by psychologists, but rather by neuropsychologists and designers who were able to quantify and measure data that had previously been considered too fluid.16 Tomkins defined eight types of affects,17 of which interest-excitement, he claimed, “has been the most seriously neglected.”18 He listed these affects in pairs of two, where the first term designates the milder, and the second one the more intense, manifestation of the affect.19 Unlike behaviorists and psychoanalysts (who regarded interest as a “secondary phenomenon, a derivative of drives”), Tomkins situated interest at the very core of human existence and progress. He proposed, in what was a rather circular definition, that “the function of this very general positive affect is to ‘interest’ the human being in what is necessary and in what it is possible for him to be interested in.”20 The possible unfolds multiple futures that could be both positive and negative.21

Tomkins relegated the pair interest-excitement primarily to the stimulation of sight and hearing. Paradoxically, he described the bodily responses to visual stimuli in the behaviorist manner that he was, in fact, critiquing.22 At the same time, while emphasizing sight and hearing,

14 Ibid., 172. 15 “The empirical analysis of consciousness has been delayed by two historical developments, Behaviorism and Psychoanalysis.” Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness (New York: Springer Publishing Company Inc., 1962), 3. Tomkins has developed an affect theory that subsequently, scholars argue, will become relevant in poststructuralist theory and queer theory. 16 “The paradox of this second half of the twentieth century is that the return to the classical problems of attention and consciousness was not a return by psychologists who had a change of heart. It is derivative rather of the initiative of the neuropsychologists and the automata designers.” (Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, 5.) 17 Ibid., 337. 18 Ibid., 337. 19 Tomkins’s categories are: (positive affects) interest-excitement; enjoyment-joy; (resetting affects) surprise-startle; (negative affects) distress-anguish; fear-terror; shame-humiliation; contempt-disgust; anger-rage. (Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, 337) 20 Ibid., 342. 21 The possible belongs equally to “the realm of the wonderful, the trivial, the distressing and the terrifying.” (Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, 345). 22 “When the object of excitement is visual there appear to be two distinct aspects to the ocular component – a fixation of the eyes on the object and a rapid visual exploration of the object. These two ocular aspects appear 236

he also acknowledged “reverie” and “reflective problem solving” as possible triggers of this affect.23 In other words, he proposed that stimulating one’s mind and imagination, and not only their senses, engenders interest and excitement. For Tomkins interest-excitement is critical in the development of both conceptual thinking and creativity:

To think, as to engage in any other human activity, one must care, one must be excited, must be continually rewarded. There is no human competence which can be achieved in the absence of a sustaining interest, and the development of cognitive competence is peculiarly vulnerable to anomie.24

Novelty also played an important role in Tomkins’s description of creativity, which he defined not “by the nature of the response, but rather by the relative novelty of the response compared to prior responses.”25 He claimed that “Without interest in novelty, there is no development of intelligence, but without an active intelligence there can be no interest in novelty.”26

Most of the times, when we qualify something as interesting, the association of novelty and interest is still the norm. Tomkins acknowledged that in order to build cognitive competence, there is a necessity for both the immediacy of novelty and the time needed to build up knowledge.27 He saw thinking and creativity as two intertwining strands. His “hypothesis of creativity as an addiction to thinking” proposed that “learning ability must be exercised to be acquired in the first place and continually practiced if it is to be retained.”28

somewhat correlated with two equally distinct respiratory responses. In one there is a cessation of breathing – the excitement of the “breathless” moment, correlated with the fixed stare at the object. In one phase the individual seems to be passively caught or fascinated by the object. In the other phase the individual is more active and seeks to maximize his acquaintance with the object.” (Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, 340) 23 “Although the affect of interest or excitement is activated by, and frequently accompanies, looking or listening to something “interesting,” it may also be activated by or accompany sexuality, or revery or reflective problem solving.” (Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, 339). 24 Ibid., 343. 25 Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, 353. 26 Ibid., 354 27 “In connection with the development of acquaintance and competence it is necessary not only to vary perceptual, conceptual, motor and memory perspectives but also to extend radically the period of acquaintance. One must live with an idea, a person, or a painting or oneself for some time before one may attain that kind of knowledge of any domain and that kind of competence which is distinctively human.” (Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, 349). 28 Ibid., 357. 237

In midcentury psychology, the concept of interest-excitement emerged as a type of affect, essential to cognition, perception, thinking, creativity, in short to life itself. Associated primarily with novelty, and visual and acoustic stimuli, the affect of interest was deemed to ensure the on- going development of a successful inner life. A parallel conversation was taking place in architecture understood primarily as a visual matter.29

Political economist Albert O. Hirschman situates the origin of interest not in the realm of subjective affects, but in the more objective one of monetary transactions. He looked at interest as a vehicle for examining capitalism and studied the dialectics between passions and interests in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in order to understand the intersections of statecraft, political science, and economy, and their consequences for twentieth century capitalism. Observing the mercantile connotation of the term interest, he made the argument that “’Interests’ of persons and groups eventually came to be centered on economic advantage as its core meaning, not only in ordinary language but also in social-science terms as ‘class interests’ and ‘interest groups.’”30 Hirschman maintained that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the notion of interest offered a middle-ground between the “traditional categories of human motivation:” (destructive) passion and (ineffectual) reason.31 In this opposition, interest embodied the rational side of passion and the passionate side of reason.32 Even when interest was not associated with material aspects, Hirschman remarked, the term denoted “an element of reflection and calculation.”33

It was the legal and economic sense of the term that was prevalent until the seventeenth century and referred “to an objective or legal share of something.”34 The extended use, denoting “a natural share or common concern,” was originally employed in a metaphorical sense.35 In one of its earliest uses, interest meant a “compensation for default on a debt” and was different from

29 I addressed some of these in the first chapter. A good reference is Amos Rapoport and Robert E. Kantor, “Complexity and Ambiguity in Environmental Design,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 33, No. 4 (1967): 210-221. 30 Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 32. 31 Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, 43. 32 “Interest was seen to partake in effect of the better nature of each, as the passion of self-love upgraded and contained by reason, and the reason given direction and force by passion.” Ibid., 43. 33 Ibid., 32. 34 Williams, Keywords of a Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 172. 35 Ibid., 172. 238

usury, which designated what we call today “interest for a deliberate loan.”36 What is important to note is that contemporary uses of interest or interesting in their sense of “attention, attraction, and concern” spring from the experience of a society based on monetary relationships.37

In a study on science and knowledge, journalist John Horgan showed that in certain scientific circles, interesting and complex are interchangeable terms: researchers have employed “‘interesting’ as a synonym for ‘complex.’”38 This observation sheds new light on the title of Venturi’s treatise, where “Complexity and Contradiction” might be understood as “The Interesting and The Contradictory.” Discussing “the end of science,” and more specifically, the end of what he called “chaoplexity,” Horgan paraphrased an old adage about beauty, suggesting that “complexity exists, in some murky sense, in the eye of the beholder.”39 Consequently, the interesting cannot claim any territory of objective certainties, but remains in the realm of subjectivity. Novelist Henry James has also drawn connections between the interesting and the complex40 wrote that “The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.”41 Years later, artist Donald Judd made the claim that artwork “needs only to be interesting.”

Venturi’s notion of complexity in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was itself ambiguous and based on sometimes dated scientific research.42 In this context, interesting and complex were related and belonged to rather undefined and vague categories. However, there is more to this association than an inadvertent accident: Vincent Scully described the Vanna Venturi house through the same lens. He appropriated the Freudian principle of condensation (i.e. bringing together the opposites in order to create a new unity) as an angle to examine Venturi’s work:

36 Ibid., 172. 37 Ibid., 173. 38 John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (Reading, Mass.: Helix Books, 1996), 198. 39 Ibid., 197. 40 Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 137. 41 Henry James quoted in Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, 136. 42 For a comprehensive discussion on Venturi’s theory of complexity, see Peter Laurence, “Contradictions and Complexities: Jane Jacobs’s and Robert Venturi’s Complexity Theories,” Journal of Architectural Education 59, No. 3 (February 2006): 49-60. 239

Here the principle of condensation becomes an extremely complex and interesting one. With the chimney rising through the gable, the general parti derives from that of the Beach House. Now, however, the living room is half vaulted, and that semicircle is picked up in the tacked-on arch of the facade; now, the whole house is rising and being split through the middle.43

The specific meanings of interest that we have examined (affect, reflection and calculation, complexity) offer a first glimpse into the nature of the interesting. They begin to illuminate the multiple layers of Venturi’s repeated use of the boring and the interesting and indicate that his take on architecture was at the same time highly subjective and claiming a scientific objectivity.

The following sections will examine interest, the interesting and the latter’s relationship with the boring in several major works in philosophy and aesthetics from the eighteenth century onward.

Immanuel Kant: free play; the interesting as deceitful. The study of interest and the interesting developed within the field of aesthetics (first defined by German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten in 1735) and in relation to judgments of taste and judgments of beauty.44

Immanuel Kant discussed interest, the interesting and boredom in The Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798). In the former, he developed a two-part theory of aesthetics revolving around the aesthetic power of judgment and, respectively, the teleological power of judgment. Central to his work were the concepts of interest, taste, the agreeable, the beautiful, the good, the sublime. Kant defined the judgment of taste at the intersection of understanding (i.e. objective reason) and imagination (i.e.

43 Vincent Scully, Modern Architecture and Other Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 265. In the same essay, Scully wrote: “Venturi … has worked most through the principle of condensation – Freud described how what he called the ‘dream work’ brought ‘dream thoughts’ into ‘dream content.’ The first stage in that process was the condensation of opposites to form a ‘new unity.’ That aesthetic idea is originally Scholastic, since Scholastic philosophy employed the word concordantia, the reconciliation of opposites, to define what Freud meant by condensation.” (Scully, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 263.) 44 The term aesthetics in its modern use was first coined by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten in 1735 and defined later in his 1750 Aesthetica. Etymologically, the word aesthetics derives from the Greek aisthetikos that was related to sense perception, sensitive, perceptive, perceptible. (Oxford English Dictionary, entry aesthetic: “Ultimately < ancient Greek αἰσθητικός of or relating to sense perception, sensitive, perceptive.”) 240

subjective feeling),45 thus situating the judgment of beauty or the aesthetic judgment in the realm of both objectivity and subjectivity. Kant presented an alternative to the two main traditions in eighteenth century aesthetics. On the one hand, the empiricist tradition was claiming that the judgment of beauty expresses a feeling without a cognitive content. On the other hand, the rationalist tradition was arguing that the judgment of beauty consists in the cognition of an object as having a universal, objective property.46 At the same time, Kant indirectly began to conceptualize the difference between arbitrary and subjective.

Kant defined interest as “the satisfaction that we combine with the representation of the existence of an object” and posited that “The satisfaction that determines the judgment of taste is without any interest.”47 Kant differentiated between grounding a judgment of taste on interest and producing an interest, where the latter generates the interesting:

A judgment on an object of satisfaction can be entirely disinterested yet still very interesting, i.e., it is not grounded on any interest but it produces an interest; all pure moral judgments are like this. But the pure judgment of taste does not in itself even ground any interest.48

Kant further distinguished between objective sensation and subjective representation of sensation (or feeling),49 and between the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good. Each of these last three concepts designate a different relationship to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure: the agreeable gratifies, the beautiful pleases, and the good is esteemed or approved for its objective value.50 The agreeable addresses the senses. The good addresses reason. The beautiful finds satisfaction in both senses and reason and is the only one among the three that is free and

45 “In order to decide whether or not something is beautiful, we do not relate the representation by means of understanding to the object for cognition but rather relate it by means of the imagination (perhaps combined with the understanding) to the subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure. The judgment of taste is therefore not a cognitive judgment, hence not a logical one, but is rather aesthetic, by which is understood one whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective.” (Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 89, 5:204) 46 Hume, Hutcheson, and Burke are representative of the first tradition, whereas Baumgarten and Meier are representative of the second. (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/ Accessed October 25, 2016) 47 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 90. 48 Ibid., 91. 5:20. 49 Kant gives the example of the difference between the green color of a meadow and the agreeableness of that color: “The green color of the meadows belongs to objective sensation, as perception of an object of sense; but its agreeableness belongs to subjective sensation, through which no object is represented, i.e. to feeling … .” (Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 92. 5:207) 50 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 95. 5:210. 241

disinterested: “One can say that among all these three kinds of satisfaction only that of the taste for the beautiful is a disinterested and free satisfaction; for no interest, neither that of the senses nor that of reason extorts approval.”51

The notion of interest is what relates the concept of taste and the concept of beautiful is: “Taste is the faculty for judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction or dissatisfaction without any interest. The object of such a satisfaction is called beautiful.”52 Furthermore, Kant will define the beautiful as that “which pleases universally without a concept.”53 The agreeable is grounded in personal feelings and the perception of the senses and has a subjective value. The beautiful, on the other hand, has universal value. The taste of the senses generates private judgments and is not ascribe to others, whereas the taste of reflection engenders generally valid judgments, being ascribed to others and to the object itself.54 Aesthetic judgments or judgments of taste have several attributes: (1) are based on feelings of disinterested pleasure; (2) claim a universal validity; (3) do not presuppose an end or a purpose; (4) stand in a relation of necessity to the object which elicits them.55

Based on disinterested pleasure, the judgment of the beautiful is different from the judgment of the agreeable (which expresses an interest in something such as food or drink) and also from the judgment of the good (which expresses an interest in the concept of moral goodness.)

Key to Kant’s critique of taste is the idea that the judgment of the object precedes the feeling of pleasure in the object.56 In this dynamics, imagination and understanding (or cognition) are situated in a relationship of free play that generates the representation of an object and the judgment of taste.57 In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had described imagination as organizing the data of sense-perception under the governance of rules that are prescribed by the

51 Ibid., 95. 5:210. 52 Ibid., 96. 5:211. 53 Ibid., 104. 5:219. 54 Ibid., 97-98. 55 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/ Accessed October 25, 2016 56 Ibid., 102. 5:217 57 “Now there belongs to a representation by which an object is given, in order for there to be cognition of it in general, imagination for the composition of the manifold of intuition and understanding for the unity of the concept that unifies the representation. This state of a free play of the faculties of cognition with a representation through which an object is given must be able to be universally communicated, because cognition … is the only kind of representation that is valid for everyone.” (Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 103. 5:218) 242

understanding. In other words, imagination was subordinated to understanding (or reason). In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, on the other hand, imagination and understanding stand in a different relationship, one of free play where the former is no longer subordinated to the latter. Imagination has gained a higher status. The beautiful resides not in the object itself, but rather in the disinterested pleasure one experiences from the free play of imagination and understanding. The judgment of taste, then, is not arbitrary – it involves, instead, a negotiation of imagination and reason.

Published in 1798, eight years after the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View addressed the issue of boredom in the first part of the book (“Anthropological Didactic”) that dealt with knowing “the interior as well as the exterior of the human being.”58 Situated in “Book II. The feeling of pleasure and displeasure,” the conversation on boredom strategically occupies the middle ground between the cognitive faculty (Book I) and the faculty of desire (Book II). Boredom and the boring are intertwined with the interesting.

Kant suggested that boredom might have critical consequences upon the very nature of the individual. This state is perceived as “a void of sensation by the human being who is used to an alternation of sensations in himself, and who is striving to fill up his instinct for life with something or other.”59 The absence of sensations impairs the cognitive faculty, which, in turn, disturbs the interior of the human being and might even lead to radical gestures: “even if no positive pain stimulates us to activity, if necessary a negative one, boredom, will often affect us in such a manner that we feel driven to do something harmful to ourselves rather than nothing at all.”60

The relationship between sensations and boredom has been set up earlier, in Book I, in the discussion on what increases or decreases sense impressions.61 Defined from the least intense to the most intense, these four techniques are: (1) contrast, (2) novelty, (3) change, and (4) intensification. It is relevant to examine the distinction between contrast and contradiction.

58 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 59 Ibid., 128. 60 Ibid., 127. 61 Ibid., 54-58. 243

While the former is the juxtaposition “of mutually contrary sense representations under one and the same concept,” the latter is the “linking of mutually antagonistic concepts.”62 Building a case through examples taken from architecture and landscape, Kant assigns a positive value to contrast and a negative one to contradiction. “A well-cultivated piece of land in a sandy desert,” “the bustle and glitter of an estate or even of a great city near the quiet, simple, and yet contented life of the farmer,” “a house with a thatched roof in which one finds tasteful and comfortable rooms inside” are all examples of contrast that enliven our representations and strengthen the senses.63 On the other hand, “poverty and ostentatiousness,” a lady wearing dirty clothes and glittering diamonds, or an extravagant dinner with the host wearing crude footwear are examples of contradiction where “one sense representation destroys or weakens the other because it wants to unite what is opposite under one and the same concept which is impossible.”64 From this perspective, we might argue that the idea of “contradiction in architecture” is not just undesirable, but also impossible.

The second technique to increase / decrease sense impressions is novelty, which counteracts the familiar of the everyday that wears out sense impressions. The new, the rare, that which has been kept hidden, belong to the same category and their role is to animate / boost attention. Through the notion of interest Kant operates a distinction between curiosity (as the desire to acquire knowledge for the sake of the new, the rare and the hidden) and a more genuine tendency to know the object of one’s attention:

Although this inclination [curiosity] only plays with ideas and is otherwise without interest in their objects, it is not to be criticized, except when it is a matter of spying on that which really is of interest to others alone.

In other words, the interest in the object itself is qualitatively different from the interest in the object as mere novelty.

Change is another way to activate the senses by alternating opposite types of stimulation (“work and rest, city and country life, social conversation and play”) that eventually result in the

62 Ibid., 55. 63 Ibid., 55. 64 Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 55. 244

strengthening of the mind.65 Through the notion of change, the interesting is defined as that quality resulting from the stimulation of senses through contrasting impressions:

Nature itself has arranged things so that pain creeps in, uninvited, between pleasant sensations that entertain the senses, and so makes life interesting. But it is absurd to mix in pain intentionally and to hurt oneself for the sake of variety, to allow oneself to be awakened in order to properly feel oneself falling asleep again … .66

Implied therein is the idea that variety generates interest in the object as novelty.

Last but not least, in Kant’s aesthetic theories intensification is the last technique of gradually increasing the intensity of sensations. Postponing enjoyment rather than consuming it all at once enriches one’s life, whether the approach is Stoic restraint or Epicurean gratification.67

In his theory on design, Venturi employs these four techniques (contrast, novelty, change and intensification) to increase sense impression. His use of contradiction is directly related to Kant’s idea of contrast and several chapters in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture directly address this topic.68 Although he appears to reject novelty, the latter results from the emphasis on the interesting. Moreover, variety as a design strategy might be construed in a twofold way: on the one hand, variety is a reaction against “Less is more” and the reductive modernist aesthetics; on the other hand, the variety resulting from combinatory techniques constitutes the ultimate goal of architecture. The examples in the book are numerous. Discussing the necessity of a complex architecture that needs to be reflected through both medium and program, Venturi writes: “the variety inherent in the ambiguity of visual perception must once more be acknowledged and exploited.”69 Opposed to modernist standardization, variety is found

65 Ibid., 56. 66 Ibid., 57. 67 “Young man! Deny yourself gratifications (of amusement, indulgence, love, and so forth), if not with the Stoic intention of wanting to do without them completely, then with the refined Epicurean intention of having in view an ever-increasing enjoyment. This stinginess with the assets of your enjoyment of life actually makes you richer through the postponement of enjoyment, even if, at the end of life, you have had to give up most of the profit from it. Like everything else, the consciousness of having enjoyment in your control is more fruitful and comprehensive than anything that gratifies through sense, because by this means it is simultaneously consumed and thus deducted from the total quality.” (Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 57-58) 68 Ch. 4 “Contradictory Levels;” Ch. 5 “Contradictory Levels Continued;” Ch. 7 “Contradiction Adapted;” Ch. 8 “Contradiction Juxtaposed.” 69 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 19. 245

in the commonplace and ordinary objects celebrated in Pop Art.70 At an urban level, it is manifested, for instance, in the unusually shaped buildings situated on the triangular blocks resulted from the intersections of diagonal avenues with the gridiron street fabric in Philadelphia.71 Finally, intensification, although never mentioned explicitly, is at work in projects that require different types of readings, from far away and from close up, such as the unbuilt design for the Copley Square in Boston.72

These four techniques constitute the background of a theory on the boring and the interesting where boredom is discussed with its pair, amusement. Having shown different strategies to activate the senses through contrast, novelty, change, and intensification, Kant describes boredom as the result of two vectors, one associated with sense perception and the other with time, a notion embedded in the German word for boredom (Langeweile or, literally, “long while”). Enjoyments make time feel shorter because the faster time passes, the more renewed one feels.73 Moreover, “Conversations that contain little exchange of ideas are called boring, and just because of this also arduous, and an entertaining man is still regarded as an agreeable man, even if not exactly an important one.”74 Implicit here is the association of enjoyment or entertainment with the passing of time, which only creates the illusion of a meaningful (or important) experience. In contrast, the void of sensations spawns a horror vacui and the fateful presentiment of a slow death.75 The question raised involves the nature of human existence: why does someone who has experienced boredom their entire life complains at the end that their life has been too short?76 The phenomenon is explained through a visual metaphor that offers a spatial visualization of a temporal feeling:

The cause of this is to be sought in the analogy with a similar observation: why do German miles (which are not measured or indicated with milestones, like the Russian

70 Ibid., 44. 71 Ibid., 62. 72 Ibid., 129-131. 73 “This also explains why things that shorten time are taken to be the same thing as enjoyments; because the quicker we make time pass, the more we feel refreshed … . If, on the contrary, we paid attention to time when it was filled with enjoyment and not merely when it brought pain we were endeavoring to leave behind us, how rightly we would regret every loss of time.” (Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 129) 74 Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 129-130. 75 Ibid., 129. 76 “But how are we to explain the phenomenon that a human being who has tortured himself with boredom for the greatest part of his life, so that every day seemed long to him, nevertheless complains at the end of his life about the brevity of life?” (Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 130.) 246

versts) always become shorter the nearer we are to a capital (e.g., Berlin), and longer the farther we are from one (in Pomerania)? The reason is that the abundance of objects seen (villages and farmhouses) produces in our memory the deceptive conclusion that a vast amount of space has been covered and, consequently, that a longer period of time necessary for this purpose has also passed. However, the emptiness in the latter case produces little recollection of what has been seen and therefore leads to the conclusion that the route was shorter, and hence the time less, than would be shown by the clock.77

The excess of objects creates the illusion of covering a vast space over a longer period of time, just like the abundance of enjoyable or entertaining events creates the illusion of a meaningful passing of time. The experienced time is different from the measured time. The temporal aspect of the boring as horror vacui is intertwined with the physical aspect of the interesting as excess. Key to understanding the tension between the boring and the interesting is the idea of deception: time appears longer or shorter depending on the events taking place; activities appear meaningful based on their mere quantity rather than their significance; a man appears agreeable when his conversations are entertaining rather than important. All these situations indicate the presence of something interesting (i.e. distracting) that appears to offer a solution to tedium while in fact it only conceals the void of boredom.

Kant’s stance is critical to unpacking the relationship boring – interesting. Firstly, he distinguishes between arbitrary and subjective. While they are often interchangeable and vague in our common parlance today, he suggests that, far from being random, the latter belongs to the judgment of taste (or the judgment of beauty). The judgment of taste is different from the judgment of the good (which involves reason) and the judgment of the agreeable (which involves the senses and is mere gratification). Thus it bridges the gap between the two and is completely disinterested because it appeals neither exclusively to reason, nor exclusively to the senses. With an emphasis on feelings and subjectivity over rationality, this judgment of beauty will become the model for aesthetics in the second half of the 19th century.78

77 Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 130. 78 Harry Francis Mallgrave, The Architect’s Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture (Oxford: Wiley- Blackwell, 2010), 56. 247

Secondly, as the judgment of taste of an object precedes the feeling of pleasure in the object, the former is the result of the free play between imagination and reason. According to Kant, it is in this free play, not in the object itself, that beauty resides. This idea might foreshadow the well-known postmodern interpretation of a work as a double-reading that, through different levels, targets different audiences. Venturi and Scott Brown’s architecture has also been construed in these terms. Philip J. Finkelpearl, an English professor without a design background, who was Venturi’s life-long friend from their Princeton years and the one who introduced him to New Criticism, wrote a review of the architects work:

A full response to this work requires an audience aware of the conventions and patient and sensitive enough to appreciate the elaborate games that are being played with scale, placement, proportion, materials, and ornamentation in this Mannerism of the Ordinary. … This is architecture that is always working on at least two levels: it satisfies practical needs by the design of familiar, affordable, carefully planned structures; at the same time it comments on or criticizes the values and tastes of the civilization that requires these forms.79

It is the free play between imagination and reason that Finkelpearl invokes in reading Venturi and Scott Brown’s architecture. The disinterested feeling of pleasure is to be found not in the architectural object itself, but rather in the judgment of taste that the objects elicits. The free play between satisfying “practical needs” and imagining the work as a critical object creates the disinterested pleasure.

Thirdly, Kant’s concern with the feeling of pleasure and displeasure leads to the conversation on boredom and sets up the premises for a theory of the boring and the interesting based on deception. Kant describes boredom as an association between time and a “void of sensations.” Defined as a lack, an absence or a deficiency, boredom is ascribed a negative value. It is a serious matter and its extended presence might damage the cognitive faculty and, eventually, the interior of the human being. Individuals have several tools to fight boredom and activate their senses and among them novelty and change bring into presence the category of the interesting. The relationship between the boring and the interesting is founded on the deceptive

79 Philip J. Finkelpearl, “Contemporary Confrontations,” JSAH 38, No. 2 (May 1979): 204. 248

nature of excess: more – more objects, more entertainment, more activities – creates the illusion of eliminating tedium but, in fact, it simply camouflages it.

More recently, philosopher Lars Svendsen has suggested multiple readings of the interesting. Associated with multiplicity and excess, the interesting results in lessening the value of objects, which in time end up being seen as disposable entities.80 Associated with novelty and excitement, the interesting is the time of childhood where everything is being newly discovered, whereas adolescence is the time of boredom, “suspended between childhood and maturity.”81

More is not less82 – Venturi’s first version of Less is a bore, which was discussed in previous chapters – contains the seeds of legitimizing the excess and overload (or the interesting) as tools against the boring. He plays on the ambivalence between his bias for tabu historical references (such as Mannerism and Baroque) and his simultaneous admiration for modern masters. More – more historic references, more precedents, more devices – will be used as a strategy to conceal what Venturi denounced as the “blatant simplification”83 (or boredom) of modern architecture.

Venturi’s approach was questioned early on even by Denise Scott Brown, at the time his colleague at University of Pennsylvania. While writing Complexity and Contradiction, Venturi asked her to read and comment on his manuscript. In a letter dated July 13, 1963, she returned carefully crafted observations on his book draft. Her closing paragraph reads:

But I think you use too many devices (always remembering that I don’t approve of any of them) and will do till you get more work and can spread them fewer per building. None of this is insulting. I respect your work … but disagree with it – mainly because I think there are other constraints acting upon us today. I like the things you like, have learned from them what you have taught, but I would apply the lessons differently.84

80 “Surrounded by an infinite selection of ‘interesting’ objects that can be chosen so as to be discarded, nothing will have any value. For that reason, immortality would have been immensely boring, for it would allow an infinite number of choices.” [Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, trans. John Irons (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 143]. 81 Ibid., 150. 82 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 16. 83 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 17. 84 Venturi Scott Brown Collection. The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. Box 70. 225.II.F.1037 249

As Scott Brown noted, the overload of devices was hiding, in fact, other, more important concerns of the time. The deceitful nature of the interesting manifested through surplus constitutes perhaps one of its most characteristic features.

Friedrich Schlegel: the interesting opposed to the beautiful. One of the earliest and most explicit critiques of the interesting comes from Friedrich Schlegel in his 1797 “On the Study of Greek Poetry.” Published after Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), but before his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), Schlegel’s study examined ideas about taste and aesthetic value. His main criticism was directed against modern poetry presented in antithesis with Greek poetry.85 The former engages with the interesting, defined as an aesthetic category in opposition with the beautiful: “Beauty is thus not the ideal of modern poetry; it is essentially distinct from the interesting.”86 One of the main features of modern poetry, Schlegel argued, is its lack of universality and the emphasis on individuality and originality.87 Stemming from this focus on subjective rather than universal experiences, the interesting lacks the set of values associated with strong categories. Modern poetry strives for individuality, rather than universality, for “something new, piquant and striking” without ever fully satisfying its desire.88

Schlegel associated the interesting with excess and quantitative measures: “Every original individual that contains a greater quantity of intellectual content or aesthetic energy is interesting.”89 He distinguished between philosophical and aesthetic content: if the former persisted, it would engender a form of critical resistance and consequently taste – the critical notion at stake in Schlegel’s argument – would become objective; if, on the contrary, aesthetic content prevailed, then taste would be reduced to a mere desire for more and more intense pleasures:

85 Friedrich Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 86 Ibid., 99. 87 Ibid., 32, 35. 88 “Furthermore, the total predominance of the characteristic, individual, and the interesting is evident throughout modern poetry, especially in more recent ages. Finally, there is the restless, insatiable striving after something new, piquant, and striking despite which, however, longing persists unappeased.” (Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, 24.) 89 Ibid., 35. 250

It will pass over quickly enough into piquancy and the astonishing. Piquancy is what stimulates a dull sensibility; the astonishing is a similar stimulus for the imagination. These are the harbingers of a near death. The jejune is the meager nourishment of the impotent; and the shocking – be it bizarre, disgusting, or horrible – is the last convulsion of a dying taste.90

Unlike the truth, the good, and the beautiful, the interesting, Schlegel argued, has a “provisional validity.”91 Distinguishing not only between philosophical and aesthetic content, but also between content and value, he did not deny the content of the interesting, but questioned its value.92

The loop of the interesting and the boring, where “the new becomes old; the unusual becomes common; the frisson of what is charming becomes dull,”93 is the dead end of intellectual and artistic pursuits. Moreover, it annihilates one’s ability to identify and value the beautiful:

Thus those who are not satisfied that Greek poetry is beautiful impose upon it an entirely foreign standard of evaluation; and in their confused pretensions they thoroughly mix together everything objective and subjective and demand that it should be more interesting. Certainly, even that which is most interesting could be more interesting […].94

Schlegel’s definition of the interesting builds upon the opposition between subjective and universal values, between (aesthetic) value and (philosophical or moral) content, between the stimulation of the senses and the stimulation of the intellect. The interesting obscures the beautiful and “desecrates” it.95 Schlegel’s critique of the interesting spawns from a particular cultural and historical context. With the advent of modernity, communities and erstwhile traditional societies become fragmented. The emphasis shifted from the values and the authority of the community to the values of the individual. The interesting validates arbitrariness and

90 Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, 36. 91 Ibid., 100. 92 Ibid., 100. 93 Ibid., 21. 94 Ibid., 72. 95 Schlegel, 83. 251

multiplicity of tastes and accompanies the focus on fragments and particulars. With the rise of individualism, every opinion is valid, if fleeting and transitory. It is around the same time, in the eighteenth century, that the mood of boredom gains visibility and the word enters the English vocabulary. The rise of individualism has been identified also as one of the main causes of the advent of boredom.96 The boring (and the interesting) are brought into presence at a time when the inner experience of the individual becomes worthy of investigation.97

Strong categories (such as the beautiful, the true, the good) are replaced by weaker ones (such as the interesting, the astonishing or the unusual). The conceptualization of the interesting and the boring happens simultaneously with the emergence of aesthetic categories that had not been examined before, such as the ugly or the sublime.98 In this context, critics have made a further distinction, that between ennui and boredom: the former has larger, more universal claims and accompanies the sense of sublime, whereas the latter is a response to immediate, mundane, and more ordinary concerns.99

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture begins with Venturi’s “gentle manifesto” written exclusively in the first person singular: I like, I do not like, I speak, I welcome, I aim, I prefer.100 If at first, this mode of writing suggests a certain modesty by avoiding any claims to universality, it gradually becomes clear that this restraint is deceitful. The use of words such as “special obligation,” “truth,” “totality,” “must,” indicate that subjectivity does, in fact, have universal claims.101 The rise of individualism and subjectivity culminates in the late years of modernity when canons are called into questions and value is ascribed based on new aesthetic categories. Liking elements that are “hybrid rather than pure, compromising rather than clean […] boring, as well as interesting, […] conventional rather than designed,” Venturi assigns them value based on a reshuffling of these new aesthetic categories. Schlegel’s distinction between strong and weak values, the ethic and the aesthetic, which is key in his definition of the

96 Patricia Meyer-Sacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 23. 97 Ibid., 23. 98 The sublime as an aesthetic category radically different from the beautiful came to prominence around the same time through the work of Edmund Burke (1756) and later that of Immanuel Kant (1764) and Arthur Schopenhauer (1818). 99 Meyer-Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind, 12. 100 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 16. 101 Ibid., 16-19. 252

interesting, constitutes the underpinning of Venturi’s subjective theory of architecture that merges lowbrow and highbrow values.

Arthur Schopenauer: the boring and the sublime; the interesting as distraction. In The World as Will and Representation (first published in 181-1919), Arthur Schopenhauer had brought together the boring and the sublime. In his view, what bridges the gap between the two is the act of contemplation, which enables the transfiguration of what might be perceived as tedious into an otherworldly experience: “Let us transport ourselves to a very lonely region of boundless horizons, under a perfectly cloudless sky, trees and plants in the perfectly motionless air, no animals, no human beings, no moving masses of water, the profoundest silence.”102 These surroundings might inspire either an “instance of the sublime in a low degree,” or the emptiness, “torture and misery of boredom.”103 As the boring and the sublime inhabit the same territory, the line between them is thin and it is one’s deliberate will for contemplation rather than despair that reveals “the touch of the sublime.”104 The ability to choose one over the other also gives the measure of one’s intellectual worth.105

For Schopenhauer boredom has an ontological dimension as the force that sets in motion the will of human beings. Human nature is subjected to a cycle of desire and satisfaction, followed by a new desire, where the lack of gratification leads to suffering and the “longing for a new desire is languor, boredom.”106 In this scenario, attention and an active mind are ultimately a form of “continuously postponed boredom.”107 Schopenhauer proposes – cynically – that life moves like a pendulum between pain and boredom where the latter is all that is left for heaven after all the suffering has been placed in hell.108 What most people need is not intellectual

102 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1958), 203. 103 Ibid., 204. 104 Ibid., 203. 105 Ibid., 203. 106 Ibid., 260. See also p.314: “The wish, the need, appears again on the scene under a new form; if it does not, then dreariness, emptiness, and boredom follow, the struggle against which is just as painful as is that against want. For desire and satisfaction to follow each other at not too short and not too long intervals, reduces the suffering occasioned by both to the smallest amount, and constitutes the happiest life.” 107 Ibid., 311. 108 Ibid., 312. 253

pleasures, but panem and circenses to cure their boredom.109 For Schopenhauer too, the nature of the interesting resides in the search for distraction and excitement:

But purely intellectual pleasures are not accessible to the vast majority of men, they are almost wholly incapable of the pleasure to be found in pure knowledge; they are entirely given over to willing. Therefore, if anything is to win their sympathy, to be interesting to them, it must (and this is to be found already in the meaning of the word) in some way excite their will, even if to be only through a remote relation to it which is merely within the bounds of possibility.110

At the core of Schopenhauer’s theory is the distinction between representation and will, where the former is the human perception of events and the latter a form of vital energy, “what today we might call the biological, electromagnetic, chemical, and gravitational forces of the world.”111 Despite its deceptive nature, the interesting through its appeal to senses is one of the forces that activates the will.

Søren Kierkegaard: the interesting as skin-deep, autonomous, self-referential. Deception and deceit constitute one of the core arguments in Søren Kierkegaard’s reflection on the ethical and aesthetic aspects of life.112 Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, he positioned the interesting within the aesthetic domain, one defined by immediacy, where appearances and outer existence are more important than the true self, where one avoids commitments and leads a life of intense pleasures, stimulated by novelty and whose quick consumption turns into boredom.113 In contrast, the ethical realm is defined by critical reflection, moral responsibility, accountability, and commitment.

109 Ibid., 313-314. 110 Ibid., 314. 111 Mallgrave, The Architect’s Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture, 58. 112 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/ Or, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 113 Ibid. 254

In the Diary of a Seducer, Kierkegaard summarizes the aesthetic nature of the interesting: “How beautiful it is to be in love, how interesting to know that one is in love.”114 From an aesthetic perspective, the essence of the real thing is secondary because the aesthete is concerned with sheer appearances and thus unable to discern between what is important and what is peripheral. There is no difference between seeing and missing the beloved one, between joy and pain as both states ultimately produce the same superficial reaction.

The interesting and the boring are, in fact, intertwined: the former creates the illusion of making the latter disappear, where in fact it simply offers a temporary distraction. While the ethical requires duration and intensity, the aesthetic is immediate and extensive. Kierkegaard criticizes the common approach of counteracting the boredom associated with the aesthetic realm through superficial changes (i.e. changes that happen on the surface or changes of the surface): tired of country life, one moves to the city, tired of Europe, one goes to America or tired of porcelain, one eats on silver.115 In his interpretation of Either / Or, Karsten Harries has remarked that “the interesting depends here on the contrast between the antecedent and the subsequent states.”116 He wrote:

interest is something with which the individual endows the situation. The situation furnishes only the occasion. … Implicit in the search for the interesting is thus a rejection of the place we have been assigned by the situation in which we find ourselves. The search for the interesting is essentially a flight from reality.117

As an alternative, Kierkegaard proposes the concept of crop rotation: rather than constantly moving to a new soil (or, in other words, constantly changing the surface), one should remain on the same soil and vary the types of crops (in other words, understand and work with limitations).118 “Here at once is the principle of limitation, the sole saving principle in the world. The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.”119 Kierkegaard suggests an intensive rather than extensive approach to the issue of boredom whose remedy resides not in

114 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/ Or, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1959), I, 330. 115 Kierkegaard, Either / Or, 1959, I, 291-2. 116 Karsten Harries, Between Nihilism and Faith: A Commentary on Either/Or (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 94. 117 Ibid., 96-97. 118 Kierkegaard, Either / Or, 1959, I, 292. 119 Ibid., I, 292. 255

perpetual change, but, rather, in thorough introspection. He brings lively examples from the world of children who, subjected to tedium, find resourceful ways of re-discovering the world: catching and playing with a fly or listening to the rain dripping through the roof120 constitute moments when the everyday is transfigured and reinvented.

The second volume of Either/Or never addressed the concept of the interesting, however its repeated use indicates a certain bias toward a sense of arbitrariness and a seductive deceitfulness. The institution of marriage seems to have the devious role of disguising various liaisons and thus making life interesting.121 The interesting is the out-of-ordinary that adds charm, but no real meaning to life.122 It is associated with diversity and change of moods and conditions that the aesthete finds through his “wit, cunning, and all the seductive gifts of the mind.”123 It is variety that determines the interesting: “for the more varied life is, the more interesting for the observer.”124 In the first volume, for the aesthete “admiration and indifference have become undifferentiated in the unity of boredom.”125 Here the aesthete does not differentiate between sorrow and joy: they both stimulate his feelings and are, therefore, interesting. The aesthete lacks the ability to recognize and appreciate ethical values:

Since you have hardened your mind to interpret all existence in esthetic categories, it is taken for granted that sorrow has not escaped your attention, for sorrow in and by itself is at least as interesting as joy. The imperturbability with which you everywhere cling to the interesting wherever it appears is a constant occasion for those around you to misunderstand you and sometimes to regard you as absolutely heartless and sometimes as a really good-natured person, although you actually are neither.126

The boring and the interesting build off one another and are intertwined in a game of entertainment and continuous distraction, or in other words, in leisure. The paradigm of our times is the dialectics work – leisure, where the latter fills up the empty (i.e. unoccupied) time

120 Ibid., I, 292. 121 “…contends that marriage actually exists to remove every tiresome appearance of innocence from the liaisons with others and to make it really interesting.” (Kierkegaard, Either / Or, 1959, II 292, 325.) 122 Ibid., 85-86; 123 Ibid., 199. 124 Ibid., II 260, 290. 125 Ibid., I 262, 290. 126 Kierkegaard, Either / Or, 1959, II, 233. 256

with equally empty (i.e. meaningless) activities. One way to break the circle of aesthetic pursuits and infinite amusements is to discover the redeeming qualities of work or to conceive of it as meaningful leisure: “One’s work nevertheless ought not to be work in the strict sense but should be able to be continually defined as pleasure.”127 This type of work is neither drudging, nor tedious, but gives one wings to fly over the world.128 This ability to find full pleasure in work, however, is an “aristocratic talent” characteristic to an ethical life that the aesthete has little access to it.129

Kierkegaard situates boredom at the origin of human civilization, which, he proposes, has been built on deceit and superficial amusement. In his own sarcastic version of the biblical genesis, the gods were bored and they created Adam; to alleviate his boredom, they made Eva; with the birth of Cain and Abel, the family of four were getting bored together and as the population grew bigger, nations and people “were bored en masse.”130 This collective boredom resulted in the attempt to build a tower high enough to reach the gods:

To amuse themselves, they hit upon the notion of building a tower so high that it would reach the sky. This notion is just as boring as the tower was high and is a terrible demonstration of how boredom had gained the upper hand. Then they were dispersed around the world, just as people now travel abroad, but they continue to be bored. And what consequences this boredom had: humankind stood tall and fell far, first through Eve, then from the Babylonian tower.131

Although akin to meaningless distraction, boredom has gained an ontological status. Unable to gauge the outcomes of their desire for aesthetic pleasures, human beings ended up as slaves of their own weakness. Aesthetic pursuits, however, have physical, architectural

127 Kierkegaard, Either / Or, 1959, II 260, 290. (“A person discovers some aristocratic talent in himself that distinguishes him from the crowd. He does not develop this recklessly, because then he would soon be bored with it, but with all the esthetic earnestness possible. Life then has a new meaning for him, since he has his work, a work that nevertheless is really his pleasure. In his independence, he shelters it so that it can develop in all its luxuriance, undismayed by life. He does not, however, make this talent into a plank on which one manages to squeeze through life but into wings on which one soars over the world; he does not make it into a drudging hack but into a parade horse.”) 128 Ibid., 290. 129 Ibid., 290. (“But our hero has no such aristocratic talent; he is like most people. The esthete knows no other way out for him than that ‘he has to resign himself to falling into the crowd’s hackneyed category of a person who works.’”) 130 Kierkegaard, Either / Or, 1959, I 258, 286. 131 Ibid., 286. 257

consequences. In this rather apocalyptic scenario, the tower of Babel and everything it stands for constitutes a concrete manifestation of the more abstract mood of boredom. Kierkegaard’s cautionary tale, sarcastic and extreme as it appears, warns about the danger of overlooking the direct, tangible effects of moods and emotions whose physical expressions have long-lasting effects. The deep abyss of boredom, its infinite dizziness and nothingness have unforeseen material results. As he wrote further, “A mistaken generally eccentric diversion has boredom within itself, and thus it works its way up and manifests itself as immediacy.”132

Writing a few decades after Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard was familiar with his works and reinterpreted his ideas about the sublime. His view of the abysmal boredom as the core of human civilization echoed the Romantic category of the sublime.133 Kierkegaard turned boredom, one of the most despised moods, into a central, if negative, condition of human progress. While Venuri’s work never explores the relationship of boredom and contemplation or the sublime, in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, he does situate boredom at the core of his theory on architecture. Reflecting, as we have seen in previous chapters, the midcentury ethos, the underlining presence of boredom indicates the discontent with the modernity and its architectural manifestations.

Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Susan Sontag, Giorgio Agamben: the interesting as periphery, marginality, curiosity. One major distinction between interest and the interesting resides in their relationship to the object examined. Discussing ideas about perception, Edmund Husserl posited that interest is critical to the apprehension of a thing or theme as the main object of contemplation. In relation to this main object, other things or themes appear secondary.134

132 Kierkegaard, Either / Or, 1959, I 262, 291. 133 Harries, Between Nihilism and Faith: A Commentary on Either/Or, 91. 134 “Rather, a specific interest – taking the term “interest” in its broader sense – is required, an interest in contemplation of one of these objects, which causes it to be apprehended as a principal theme. We carefully observe the penholder, for example. Our attention wanders from it, which (as our theme) is still retained in grasp, to the table top. We also draw the latter within our sphere of observation, not as a principal theme but only as a theme in relation to the penholder.” [Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 153]. 258

Martin Heidegger proposed a similar idea. Building upon the Latin etymology (inter esse), he defined interest as being “among and in the midst of things” or being “at the center of a thing” and staying with it.135 In contrast, contemporary meanings of the interesting have shifted toward something that, turned indifferent, can be immediately replaced with something else.136 While the interest is intimately connected to the essence of a thing, the interesting resides at its periphery, the location of disposable attributes. In this light, the interesting thing belongs to “the ranks of what is indifferent and soon boring.”137 Situated in a continuous loop, the boring and the interesting represent, in fact, two sides of one and the same condition.

In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger has distinguished between two forms of curiosity: one that expresses a form of encountering the world through perception, not confined to seeing but using sight as a general form of knowing; and another one that designates a form of seeing not in order to know but “just in order to see.”138 Heidegger’s approach echoed Kant’s earlier distinction between interest in the object itself and interest in the object as novelty, the latter being relegated to the realm of curiosity. Similarly, for Heidegger curiosity “seeks novelty only in order to leap from it anew to another novelty.”139 Restlessness and the possibility of distraction are the defining attributes of curiosity, which “is everywhere and nowhere.”140 In “What is Thinking?” (1951-1952) Heidegger will situate interest at the center of a thing; in Being and Time, curiosity lacked precisely that intimate connection with the very nature of a thing, the ability to observe and marvel at things, which is how the interesting will be defined later. Without specifically addressing the interesting or its relationship with curiosity, in Being and Time Heidegger inferred a kinship between the two where both are concerned with the periphery, the new, and the inessential. Unlike wonder, which constitutes the foundation of philosophy and reveals the most intimate nature of things, curiosity operates in the realm of dispensable and superfluous attributes.

135 Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1976). 136 Ibid., 5. 137 Ibid., 5. 138 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1967), 171-172. 139 Heidegger, Being and Time, 172. 140 Ibid., 217. 259

Susan Sontag defined the interesting as “the commonplace, the inessential, the accidental, the minute, the transient.”141 She found it in the nineteenth-century novel (the archetypal art form of the time), which fully articulated the ethos of the period: the dullness of reality, the lack of spirituality, and the discovery of the interesting.142

Influenced by Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben also defined curiosity as the restless activity that “seeks what is new only to jump once again toward what is even newer, and that, incapable of taking care of what is truly offered to it, obtains, through the impossibility of sustaining attention … the constant availability of distraction.”143 Distraction is what eventually enables the interesting to manifest itself.

If “philosophy begins in wonder,”144 curiosity offers the realm of the interesting as an alternative to an introspective view of the world.

Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: the interesting at the center. Unlike Husserl, Heidegger, and Agamben, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari situate the interesting, rather than the interest, at the very core of their philosophy, which, they argue, “does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure.”145 For Deleuze and Guattari, writings in philosophy lack importance or interest when they fail to create a concept or an image, and to bring a new twist to an old problem.146 They define the “naturally uninteresting” as either flimsy, or petrified concepts that do not present an opportunity for further development. The interesting is critical for understanding criticism as a creative endeavor.147 Ideas about the interesting converge with ideas about the new, where the former implies the latter:

Criticism implies new concepts (of the things criticized) just as much as the most positive creation. Concepts must have irregular contours molded on their living material. … Even

141 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 101. 142 Ibid., 101. 143 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 5. 144 Plato, Theaetetus 155c-d, tr. Jowett. 145 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 82. 146 Ibid., 82. 147 Ibid., 82. 260

the history of philosophy is completely without interest if it does not undertake to awaken a dormant concept and to play it again on a new stage … .148

Ralph Barton Perry: interest and the interesting as predisposition. A student of William James (the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States), American philosopher Ralph Barton Perry introduced a significant nuance in the definition of interest. Unlike most interpretations, which describe interest as a positive inclination toward something, he proposed that interest discloses either a favorable or an adverse attitude toward an object: a “state, act, attitude or disposition of favor or disfavor.” Interest is essentially a biased perspective, highly subjective, that cannot be explained in cognitive terms. It shows a natural, inherent predisposition of human beings to be for or against certain things.149 Defined as disposition, the interest finds affinities with the mood of boredom and more subjective concepts like emotions and feelings. (Perry had a significant influence on Donald Judd and his theories about the interesting in art.)

A similar distinction between a positive and a negative interest suggested Bertrand Russell. He distinguished between external interest, which inspires one to pursue different activities and prevent ennui, and interest in oneself, which is passive and not conducive to any growth.150

Michael L. Raposa: the interesting and the role of imagination. Building upon earlier definitions of boredom, philosopher Michael L. Raposa describes it as a semiotic and relational matter: boredom arises from one’s inability to interpret “the information in any given situation as

148 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 83. 149 “It is characteristic of living mind to be for some things and against others. This polarity is not reducible to that between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in the logical or in the purely cognitive sense, because one can say ‘yes’ with reluctance or be glad to say ‘no.’ To be ‘for’ or ‘against’ is to view with favor or disfavor; it is a bias of the subject toward or away from. It implies … a tendency to create or conserve, or an opposite tendency to prevent or destroy. This duality appears in many forms, such as liking and disliking, desire and aversion, will and refusal, or seeking and avoiding. It is to this all-pervasive characteristic of the motor –affective life, this state, act, attitude or disposition of favor or disfavor, to which we propose to give the name of interest.” [Ralph Barton Perry, General Theory of Value: Its Meanings and Basic Principles Construed in Terms of Interest (New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1926), 115]. 150 Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (New York: Liveright, 1958), 18. 261

meaningful or interesting”151 and resides in the relationship between the object and the subject. Further, he maintains that “it might be possible to argue that all situations are intrinsically interesting.”152 The implicit assumption is that the interesting is the opposite of boring, an idea also found in his description of art as being more real and significant than everyday life “because it is more interesting.”153

It is through imagination, Raposa proposes, that one discovers the infinitely interesting within the apparently boring, an insight which he continues to identify as a semiotic process.154 Although never specifically articulated, an important idea is that the boring and the interesting are not inherent properties of the object, but rather it is the role of imagination to distinguish between them.

Conclusions. We have seen that the ostensibly indeterminate category of the interesting has an intellectual history rooted in aesthetic theories developed mainly from the late eighteenth century onward. The boring and the interesting exist in a Janusian relationship rather than in a dialectical opposition. The interesting designates the attitude of the autonomous and self- referential aesthete who lacks a solid world view and the capacity to recognize ethical values (Kierkegaard). It is often deceitful and distracting (Kant, Schopenhauer), associated with novelty and excess (Kant, Schlegel), and curiosity, rather than wonder (Heidegger, Sontag, Agamben). These various attributes have distilled down into the architectural discourse as emphasis on appearance (resulting in the autonomy of the architectural object), combinatory techniques as design strategies (resulting in self-referential and normative practices), and a bias for excess and overload (often described in terms of complexity). While midcentury architecture embraced these approaches as an immediate reaction against the sterility of Modernism (deemed dull), the interesting sought through formal exercises itself quickly turned boring. Facilitated by newer, more performant, and more efficient software and technologies, such as 3D printing, digital

151 Michael L. Raposa, “Boredom and the Religious Imagination,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53. No. 1 (March 1985), 77. 152 Ibid., 77. 153 Ibid., 81. 154 Ibid., 82. 262

fabrication or parametric design, the search for the interesting continues to inform the architectural practice at an ever increasing speed.

The faculty of imagination is critical to breaking the endless loop of the boring and the interesting. For Kant, the judgment of taste is not arbitrary, but involves a negotiation of imagination and reason, which are situated in a relationship of free play. For Raposa, the boring and the interesting do not belong to the object, but rather are a matter of the relationship between subject and object. It is through imagination that one overcomes their dichotomy.

Where Venturi’s theory on the boring and the interesting fails to become operational is in disregarding the role of imagination. Venturi focuses on architectural forms and their semiotic interpretation as symbols, which results in disembodied shapes and “decorated sheds,” no different from the modernist boxes he is criticizing. The faculty of imagination could bridge the gap between perception and reason. Through narrative and storytelling, architecture has the potential to activate people’s imagination and engage them in meaningful acts and events, without the use of explicit signs.

3.2. Boredom and midcentury visual arts

The intellectual history of the boring and the interesting has a particular resonance with the midcentury artistic discourse. With its simplicity, uniformity, seriality and lack of affect, midcentury Minimal and Conceptual Art generated intense polemics around boredom, the boring and the interesting that have extended beyond the years when they emerged.

The boring and the interesting in midcentury visual arts. The apparent paradox of “interesting boring things” was formulated in 1949 by John Cage: “The responsibility of the artist consists in perfecting his work so that it may become attractively disinteresting.”155 Cage identified the creative potential of boredom: “… the way to get ideas is to do something boring.

155 John Cage, Silence: Lecture and Writings (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 64, 88. 263

For instance, composing in such a way that the process of composing is boring induces ideas.”156 Quoting a Zen aphorism, he recommended: “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it's not boring at all but very interesting.”157 An adept of Zen practices in his late years, Saul Steinberg said: “The life of the creative man is led, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.”158

Frequently quoted, Andy Warhol famously said: “I like boring things.”159 In Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi and Scott Brown used this quip as the motto of the chapter “Some Definitions Using the Comparative Method.”160 The chapter revolves around the comparison between Venturi’s Guild House (seemingly boring, but really interesting) and Paul Rudolph’s Crawford Manor (apparently interesting, but actually boring) and concludes with the table comparing the boring and the interesting in architecture.

In 1965, art historian and critic Barbara Rose wrote: “If, on seeing some of the new paintings, sculpture, dances or films, you are bored, probably you were intended to be. Boring the public is one way of testing its commitment.”161 The following year, relegating the issue of boredom to the audience, rather than to the work itself, Susan Sontag made the argument that “there is, in a sense, no such thing as boredom. Boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustration. And the new languages which the interesting art of our time speaks are frustrating to the sensibilities of educated people.”162 A few years later, she described this approach as an aesthetics of silence: “Cultivating the metaphor of silence suggested by conventionally lifeless subjects (as in much Pop Art) and constructing ‘minimal’ forms that seem to lack emotional resonance are in themselves vigorous, often tonic choices.”163 Art critic Hilton Kramer was skeptical that boredom actually moves the audience and suggested it was employed as a rhetorical tool to draw interest: “Now it is true that much of this art is boring, and one is at

156 Ibid., 12. 157 Ibid., 93. 158 Robert Hughes, “The World of Steinberg,” Time 111, No. 16 (4/17/1978). 159 Andy Warhol cited in Bob Colacello Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close-Up. 160 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 2nd edition (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1998), 87. 161 Barbara Rose, “ABC Art,” Art in America (October 1965). 162 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 303. 163 Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. Cited in Sam Hunter, American Art of the 20th Century (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1973), 372. 264

first relieved to hear that one’s own boredom in confronting it is, after all, the correct response. […] in reading her [Barbara Rose’s] essay one’s own boredom is quickly dissipated, one’s interests aroused.”164

The debate continued over the years. Writing in 1971, art critic and curator Lucy Lippard was critical of the claim that the mood of boredom has a positive impact on the audience:

The fact is that the process of conquering boredom that makes the pleasure of art fully accessible is a time-consuming one. Most people prefer to stay with boredom, though it does seem in view of the deluge of recently published comment about boredom in the arts, to be a pretty fascinating boredom.165

By 1972, when Sam Hunter published American Art in the 20th Century, this new aesthetics was conceptualized as “the aesthetics of boredom.”166 Hunter described it as a new type of artistic sensibility that replaced the post-war abstract expressionism, a sensibility “based on a conscious program of emotional disengagement, formal rigor, and anonymity of authorship.”167 It was not only visual arts that confronted this new affect, boredom was present in the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the performances of Merce Cunningham, the music of John Cage, and the uneventful movies of Andy Warhol.168

A distinction needs to be made between works that take on boredom as their subject and works that aim to engender the affect of boredom into the viewer. In both cases, however, the implicit assumption is that the boring is, in fact, interesting. The boring-turned-interesting was a deliberate strategy of the 1960s and produced an art that was meant to be “surprising – but not

164 Hilton Kramer, “An Art of Boredom?” New York Times (June 5, 1978), sec. 2, p.23. Cited in Frances Colpitt, “The Issue of Boredom: Is It Interesting?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, No.4 (Summer 1985): 361. 165 Lucy R. Lippard, “After a Fashion – The group Show,” Changing (New York, 1971), 205. Cited in Frances Colpitt, “The Issue of Boredom: Is It Interesting?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, No.4 (Summer 1985): 360. 166 Sam Hunter, American Art in the 20th Century (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1972) – the chapter “The Aesthetics of Boredom: Abstract Painting Since 1960.” 372-413. 167 Hunter, American Art in the 20th Century, 372. 168 Ibid., 372. 265

that surprising.”169 The boring / interesting was a subject of great interest in all midcentury art forms.

In Europe, the cinematography of the 1950s and 1960s brought forth the topic of boredom at the height of modernity in a series of films that exposed the anxieties and discontents of the moderns. Michelangelo Antonioni’s films Le Amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955), L’Avventura (The Adventure, 1960) and La Notte (The Night, 1961) were cross-cuts through the life of middle-upper class Italian socialites, who spend their lives in pursuit of an easy-to-achieve happiness meant to fill their interior voids. Antonioni’s characters suffered from boredom without knowing it. In films like Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime (1967) Jacques Tati told the story of modern boredom as a dialogue between people and their environment. Alberto Moravia, known to his friends as a perpetual victim of boredom, published in 1960 the novel La Noia, followed in 1963 by an eponymous movie.170 Originally translated as The Empty Canvas (most likely out of fear that a direct translation – Boredom – would not appeal to an English-speaking audience), the novel, written in first person, told the story of the neurotic love of a disenchanted painter for an easy girl. Dino’s failure to understand that the impossibility of truly knowing Cecilia beyond their sexual encounters, reflected his own failure to represent the world and engage with it, in other words his own failure as a painter. It was this disengagement and indifference that constituted Dino’s inherent boredom.

Art criticism: the interesting as judgment of value. The discourse on the boring and the interesting in visual arts continued into the last decades of the twentieth-century as a form of meta-criticism. In 1985, art critic Frances Colpitt published an attention-getting article “The Issue of Boredom: Is It Interesting?” that mapped the main claims in the argument over the boring or interesting character of a work of art.171 Looking both at artists (Donald Judd, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol) and critics (Susan Sontag, Lucy Lippard, Barbara Rose, Michael Fried,

169 Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 145. 170 “But, on encountering him, I would first, automatically, ask him how he was. ‘Mi annoio,’ he would usually reply, in his clipped, telegraphic way.” William Weaver, “Introduction,” in Alberto Moravia, Boredom (New York: New York Review of Books, 1999 [1960], vi.) 171 Frances Colpitt, “The Issue of Boredom: Is It Interesting?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43 No.4 (Summer 1985): 359-365. 266

Clement Greenberg, Bruce Boice, Richard Lind), she made the argument that to value formally reductive and undifferentiated objects requires the deliberate “commitment and concentration of attention” of the viewer. She concludes: “The tendency has been to dismiss as boring any object or experience that does not meet the contemporary audience’s appetite for immediate sensory stimulation and satisfaction.”172

Colpitt’s article prompted two responses: supporting her point of view, Richard Lind clarified some of the claims of the essay;173 on the other hand, ten years later, Derek Matravers, argued that “Colpitt has failed to produce any justification for paying attention to boring objects.”174 He claimed there is a distinction between boring and interesting objects or experiences and it makes sense to seek the latter rather than the former.175

More recently, art historian and critic Jonathan Flatley examined the similarities between Donald Judd and Andy Warhol in terms of their “affectless art.”176 He proposed that Judd’s use of the term “interesting” and Warhol’s use of the term “liking” reflected similar ideas about the aesthetic experience, namely “the attempt to produce emotion without representing it.”177 Thus they challenged the strategies of Abstract Expressionism, which sought to elicit an emotion by representing it.178 It is this space of disinterestedness that provides the viewer with the necessary distance to have insights about emotions otherwise too direct in the realm of everyday life.”179

One of the most recent and significant contributions to the field comes from literary and cultural theorist Sianne Ngai who has produced a body of work revolving around what she calls “states of weakness,” “’minor’ or non-cathartic feelings,” and “trivial aesthetic categories” such as zany, cute and interesting.180 While the aesthetic theories developed by Immanuel Kant in the

172 Colpitt, “The Issue of Boredom: Is It Interesting?” 364. 173 Richard Lind. “Why Isn’t Minimal Art Boring?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Vol. 45. No. 2 (Winter 1986), pp. 195-197. 174 Derek Matravers. “Is Boring Art Just Boring?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Vol. 53. No. 4 (Autumn 1995), 425. 175 Ibid., 425. 176 Jonathan Flatley. “Allegories of Boredom” in A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958-1968 ed. Ann Goldstein (Cambridge, Mass.: The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, 2004). 177 Flatley, “Allegories of Boredom,” 52. 178 Flatley, “Allegories of Boredom,” 52. 179 Flatley, “Allegories of Boredom,” 52. 180 Sianne Ngai in conversation with Adam Jasper. “Our Aesthetic Categories: An Interview with Sianne Ngai,” Cabinet 43 (Fall 2011): 45. See also Ngai’s books Ugly Feelings (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005) and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012). 267

eighteenth century or Clement Greenberg in the twentieth make the argument that the aesthetic experience cannot exist without judgment, Ngai proposes that aesthetic categories are both discursive evaluations and objective styles.181 Her focus on trivial, overlooked, but never marginal, aesthetic categories reveals the centrality of these concepts not only to postmodern culture, but, more importantly, to the concept of the aesthetic itself. The field of aesthetics, she argues, has been radically transformed by the commodification and network information specific to late capitalism.182

Key to Ngai’s argument is the idea that “judgments like ‘interesting’ seem to demand justification,”183 that they initiate a dialogue and engage the interlocutors in a critical exchange:

Judging something interesting is often a first step in actually making it so. Which is why there is an explicitly pedagogical dimension to the interesting. … Explicitly asking us to link our aesthetic judgments to extra-aesthetic ones (in the act of justification), the evaluation of interesting tends, if nothing else, to prolong critical conversations.184

Not unlike Kierkegaard’s definition of an aesthetic, rather than ethic perspective on life in which the individual is autonomous, uncommitted, and constantly searching for distraction and entertainment, Ngai describes the maker of interesting art as lacking attachment to any particular worldview and, consequently, unable to thoroughly pursue any subject-matter.185 She builds a connection between certain nineteenth century realist practices and twentieth century Conceptual Art with its focus on “documentation, classification, and the presentation of evidence”186 or what she calls “a late twentieth-century aesthetic of difference as information.”187 Ngai situates the interesting at the intersection of “affect-based judgment and concept-based-explanation”188 and notices how it is intertwined with the boring through a similar indetermination of affect.189 She

181 Ngai, “Our Aesthetic Categories: An Interview with Sianne Ngai,” 47. 182 Ibid., 47. 183 Ibid., 47. 184 Ibid., 50. 185 Ibid., 50. 186 Ibid., 51. 187 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, 112. 188 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, 116. 189 “’Interesting’ looks like the antithesis of disinterestedness. There is, however, a sense in which its indeterminate affect makes the two seem less different than alike, which may also explain why the interesting is so prone to turn boring. … Much like the way in which the interesting toggles – is itself a toggling – between aesthetic and 268

argues that the interesting offers a particular modern response to “novelty as it necessarily arises against a background of boredom” and “to change against a background of sameness.”190

The interesting re-emerges in the various forms of mid- and late- twentieth century art, from Conceptual Art and Minimal Art to Pop Art and Serial Art, through an aesthetic of difference as information, documentation, and evidence.191 Looking at late-twentieth century visual arts, Ngai argues that the interesting is

an aesthetic about this very tension between difference and typicality – or standardization and individuation – in capitalist modernity writ large. … its resurgence in the 1960s was spurred by the growth of new media and new communication technologies that led the way in transitioning the United States from an automated into an informed and networked society.192

An important artist operating within this framework is Ed Ruscha who, between 1962 and 1973, published sixteen photography books that were looking at a variety of typologies from gas stations to Los Angeles apartments, parking lots, and swimming pools. Ruscha had a significant influence on the work of Venturi and Scott Brown, especially due to Scott Brown’s familiarity with his work after the time she had spent on the West Coast. She illustrated her 1969 article “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning” with images from Ruscha’s 1967 book Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles.193 In Learning from Las Vegas the elevation of the Las Vegas Strip is based on Ed Ruscha’s 1966 Every Building on the Sunset Strip where the artist photographed from a car every single building on both sides of Sunset Boulevard and assembled the images in an accordion-type book. In addition to constructing evidence in an almost forensic manner, Ruscha’s book was also operating, perhaps inadvertently, at another level: the actual length of the boulevard was embodied into the scaled-down length of the book, a dimension that was entirely missing from the Las Vegas elevation. Ruscha claimed that his work had no hidden meaning, that it was entirely subjective and simply based on what seemed right to him at a

nonaesthetic judgments, the wavering between the boring and the interesting seems internal to the interesting.” (Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, 134). 190 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, 136. 191 Ibid., 143-145. 192 Ibid., 146. 193 Denise Scott Brown. “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35:3 (1969): 184-186. 269

certain time. Embracing the arbitrariness and indeterminacy of the interesting, he stated: “I’m interested in what is interesting.”194 Similarly, in a statement that had spawned countless threads of criticism, minimalist artist Donald Judd famously asserted: “A work needs only to be interesting.”195

Judd’s statement was part of “Specific Objects,” the-article-turned-manifesto that he published in 1965. His discussion revolved around the new three-dimensional work emerging in the art world, situated at the intersection of painting and sculpture (Figure 3.1.-3.3). Written as and intended to be an overview of the state of contemporary art commissioned by Arts Yearbook, the essay became a manifesto for new art forms as well as for Judd’s own views.196 Among the topics Judd touched on were wholeness, new materials, large scale, and seriality.197 Addressing the issue of the wholeness of an artwork, he wrote: “The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting.”198

In Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Venturi’s emphasis on “the difficult whole” shows the important role contemporary art movements play in his thinking. At a time when “weaker” aesthetic categories were becoming more relevant in the critical discourse, it is important to acknowledge the intersections between fields and disciplines.

Judd’s take on the interesting has been the subject of intense polemics. Critics Michael Fried and Hal Foster have suggested that this concept replaced the demand for quality with that for interest and that it was more or less equivalent to “merely interesting.”199 Judd, however, rejected this position and, as art critics Francis Colpitt and James Meyer show, did relate the interesting with the idea of quality.200 The philosopher Ralph Barton Perry who had discussed interest and the interesting in terms of predisposition, has a critical influence on Judd’s artistic theories:

In discussing the definition of value, we shall be dealing constantly with the motor- affective life; that is to say, with instinct desire, feeling, will … it is necessary therefore

194 Ruscha cited in Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, 144. 195 Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook, 8 (1965): 74-77. 196 James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001): 134. 197 Meyer, Minimalism, 138. 198 Judd, “Specific Objects” in Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975, 187. 199 Meyer, Minimalism, 139-140. 200 Ibid., 140. 270

to have a term which may be used to refer to what is characteristic of this strain in life and mind … The term interest is the most acceptable.201

A central argument in Judd’s essay is that interest, after all, can connote value.202 An interesting work is such if it holds one’s gaze and prompts the viewer to look at it again and again. A common thread that ties together all these different takes on the interesting is that it is primarily a visual experience.

Karsten Harries: the critique of the interesting. In 1968, Karsten Harries published The Meaning of Modern Art: A Philosophical Interpretation, a volume that looked at the emergence of modern art as a consequence of the dissolution of the ideals built upon the Platonic-Christian tradition.203 Harries was writing at a time when various forms of Modern and avant-garde art co-existed with the more recent Conceptual Art, Pop Art, and Minimalism. In the preface of the book he remarked, in what today, decades later, reads as a truism and a common place, that “The artist no longer has an obvious, generally accepted route to follow. One sign of this is that there is no one style today comparable to Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, or Baroque.”204 In the absence of a prevalent direction, Harries asked, what are the criteria that modern artists employ in making choices? His concerns were aligned with those of other current cultural critics and theorists, such as, for instance, Sigfried Giedion who, during the same decades, decried the lack of direction and the state of “confusion and boredom” manifested in contemporary arts and architecture.

The chapter titled “The Search for the Interesting,” built upon Kierkegard’s Either / Or and contained the seeds of Harries’s commentary to Kierkegaard, which he published decades later. The chapter was a critique of the reliance of visual arts on the concept of interesting that “depends on a movement of reflection which enables the individual to detach himself from his

201 Ralph Barton Perry, General Theory of Value: Its Meaning and Basic Principles Construed in Terms of Interest (New York: Longmans, Green, 1926), 17. 202 Colpitt, “The Issue of Boredom: Is It Interesting?” 361. 203 Karsten Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art: A Philosophical Interpretation (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). 204 Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art, xiv-xv. 271

engaged being in the world in order to enjoy it.”205 The world-view of Kierkegard’s aesthete consists in an agglomeration of random objects lacking meaning and relevance.206 In this context, there is no difference between the boring and the interesting as states of mind. They both have in common the distance and disengagement from the world in which the aesthete operates. Seeking an escape from reality, the aesthete, or the bored modern man, finds such a refuge in art, which, in turn, becomes arbitrary. 207 Harries proposes a spatial understanding of the interesting that relates the individual and her place in the world. The interesting lures people into breaking free from their own place in the world and finding pleasure in the unusual and the surprising.

It dislocates man by presenting him with something unexpected or novel. Its appeal depends on certain expectations which are then disappointed. Thus the normal is boring, the abnormal interesting. Something taken out of its normal context, e.g. a can of Campbell’s soup presented as a work of art is interesting. To stress the unimportant, giving it great importance, can be interesting.208

“The concern for the interesting,” Harries writes, leads to the adoption of arbitrariness as an aesthetic principle.” Underlying Harries’s critique was a question about the criteria employed to determine the creation and evaluation of a work of art and its relationship with the audience. Embracing the arbitrary, the modern work of art severs any possible dialogue with the spectator who ends up investing the work with meanings that were never intended to be there in the first place. This phenomenon of over-reading into a work and attributing it arbitrary meanings ultimately creates the expectation for novelty and change. “The interesting demands novelty. If one has an interest in the interesting, to say that something has already been done is devastating criticism.”209 For Harries, “the interest in the interesting” is one of the main characteristics of art since 1790, becoming something analogous to an artistic movement. While “the masters of the interesting” base their artistic growth on discontinuity and novelty, a possible response to the

205 Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art, 54. 206 Ibid., 54. 207 Ibid., 56-57. 208 Ibid., 57. 209 Ibid., 59. 272

increase of arbitrary freedom is to be found in Kierkegaard’s advice for limitation and restraint.210

If in 1968 Harries developed his criticism around visual arts, thirty years later with the publication of The Ethical Function of Architecture (1997) he explicitly addressed architectural issues. Building upon Giedion’s chapter “Confusion and Boredom,” which was part of the 1967 edition of Space, Time and Architecture, and his own earlier argument against a purely aesthetic approach, Harries discussed postmodern architecture in terms of a search for the interesting. Specifically, he looked at Venturi’s work as a founding moment for postmodern architecture.

Like other postmodern architects, Venturi has enjoyed appearing in humanist dress, but did he not give us a more helpful pointer when he opposed to Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more” his own equally quotable “less is a bore?” This suggests that postmodern has its origin not so much in a humanistic (that is to say, in an ethical) as in a merely aesthetic response to modernism – more precisely, in the already mentioned response that, born of boredom, seeks relief in a cultivation of the interesting.211

While Harries joined a long list of critics who have long questioned Venturi and Scott Brown’s approach to architecture, he is the only one who framed his critique around the concepts of boring and interesting. Harries’s main question (“should architecture strive to be interesting?”212) opens up other questions: is the relationship between modern and postmodern architecture similar to that between early Gothic and late Gothic, or between the classical Renaissance of Brunelleschi’s Ospedale degli Innocenti and the more elaborate Renaissance of Palladio’s Palazzo Chiericati? Is architecture to be perceived and experienced only as a visual form? Harries looked at Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History to offer a more nuanced answer to these enquiries. Wölfflin had made the argument that between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a specific shift happened in the nature of artistic vision and formulated five pairs of opposing concepts that demonstrated this shift.213 One of them was the shift from absolute to relative clarity, which was related to the one from linear to painterly representations. In

210 Ibid., 60. 211 Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture, 9. 212 Ibid., 8. 213 The five pairs of formal principles are: linear / painterly, planar / recessional, closed form / open form, multiplicity / unity, absolute clarity / relative clarity. 273

Renaissance and Baroque, Wölfflin applies these ideas to distinguish between the two architectural styles. Harries proposed to interpret postmodern architecture in Wölfflin’s terms as a progress from one type of clarity to another and from linear to painterly.

This was, in fact, in less explicit terms, Venturi’s own approach. Never comfortable with the postmodern label, in Complexity and Contradiction he was searching for ways to break away from the modern idiom, perhaps inadvertently following Wölfflin’s theory. As we will see in the next section, Wölfflin emphasis on form, as well as his questions about the causes of changes in style, were based on visual perception and the concept of empathy. His comparative strategies, his conversations about pairs of opposites were common to nineteenth century art history studies and eventually found their echo in Venturi’s theory. The comparative method remained for years to come a didactic tool for the team Venturi-Scott Brown. As an architectural critic remarked more recently, in the revised edition of Learning from Las Vegas, “the new layout facilitates the comparison [between Venturi’s Guild House and Rudolph’s Crawford Manor] in true Wölfflinian fashion, as the two buildings face each other on opposite pages, separated by the cleft of the spine and drawn to the same scale.”214

We have seen that in the midcentury art, the boring and the interesting raised to prominence not only as aesthetic categories but also as critical terms. The next section will show their specific use in Venturi’s architectural discourse.

3.3. Is boring architecture interesting?

Perhaps an homage to Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture, Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture is structured in ten chapters that lay out his architectural theory, plus an eleventh one presenting his own work. In the tenth chapter, Venturi makes an argument for what he calls “the obligation toward the difficult whole”215 in architecture. Combining Gestalt theories (which state that a whole is more than the sum of its parts) and complexity theories (that define a complex system as a “large number of parts that interact in a non-simple

214 Aron Vinegar. I am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2008. 168. 215 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 88. 274

way”216), Venturi once again builds his argument around formalist composition. His emphasis is on number-based rules (such as duality and binuclear plan) and inflection of different parts.217 To legitimate his position, he repeatedly references Baroque and Mannerist precedents. (More than twenty six percent of the images come belong to these movements.) In this context, he brings up Heinrich Wölfflin’s concept of the “unified unity” of Baroque: “This subordination of parts corresponds to Wölfflin’s ‘unified unity’ of the Baroque – which he contrasts with the ‘multiple unity’ of the Renaissance.”218

Venturi never clarifies the reference to Wölfflin, nor does he mention any work by the Swiss art critic. I propose that Venturi’s emphasis on symbolic forms and ideas about vitality were closer to nineteenth century aesthetic theories than to Baroque or Mannerist precedents or even contemporary examples drawn from Pop Art and New Criticism. The concept of empathy and the term vitality developed through the work of Robert Vischer, Theodor Lipps and Wilhelm Worringer, Heinrich Wölfflin’s theory on stylistic evolution and Adolf Göller’s ideas about changes in style have indirectly distilled down into Venturi’s work.

Robert Vischer and Wilhelm Worringer: empathy and vitality. The concept of empathy (Einfühlung in German – literally in-feeling or feeling-into) was introduced in 1873 by Robert Vischer in his doctoral dissertation entitled “On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics” and was defined as an unconscious projection of the bodily form of an individual into the form of an object.219 Vischer founded his theory on a physiological and neurological basis and on the notion of similarity explained as the harmony between the subject and the object.220 Thus, a horizontal line might be more pleasing than a diagonal one because the former resonates with the structure of visual perception.221 In looking at a small object we experience a “contractive feeling”, whereas in looking at a large building we experience an

216 Ibid., 88. 217 Ibid., 88-90. 218 Ibid., 90. 219 Mallgrave. The Architect’s Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture, 77. 220 “He means by this not only that we tend to relate objects to our bodily form but also that they, in turn, relate in varying degrees to the workings of our nerves, muscles, and those mysterious ‘neural modifications’ […].” (Mallgrave, The Architect’s Brain, 78.) 221 Ibid., 78. 275

“expansive feeling.”222 One’s empathic relationship with an object is essentially “physiognomic or emotional” and it is through our imagination that we invest objects with vital energy.”223 Critical to Vischer’s theory was the notion of vitality. He claimed that an empathetic experience “leads to a strengthening or a weakening of the general vital sensation.”224 Empathy and vitality were central to the theories of Theodor Lipps and Wilhelm Worringer and became key notions for Art Nouveau artists and architects such as August Endell and Henry van de Velde.225

In his Abstraction and Empathy (first published in German in 1908 and in the first English translation in 1953), Wilhelm Worringer proposed an interpretation of art based on what he saw as two opposite concepts. Building upon Theodor Lipps’s aesthetic theories, he was the first to legitimize abstraction as equal to realism. In an evolutionary manner, he argued, in fact, that “the urge to abstraction stands at the beginning of every art and in the case of certain peoples at a high level of culture remains the dominant tendency, whereas with the Greeks and other Occidental peoples, for example, it slowly recedes, making way for the urge to empathy.”226 He associated empathy with the gratification found in the beauty of the organic and the abstract with the inorganic and the crystalline,227 and claimed that the value of a work of art resides in its power to impart happiness.228 That the reproduction of the “organically beautiful vitality” releases a sensation of happiness constitutes the presupposition of empathy.229 “The value of a line, of a form consists for us is the value of the life that it holds for us. It holds its beauty only through our own vital feeling.”230

Apparently, there is no direct connection between the concepts of empathy and vitality in Venturi’s work. In fact, both Venturi and Scott Brown have been highly critical of the various forms of expressionism manifested in modern architecture and whose origins could be traced all the way back to the nineteenth century notion of empathy. In Learning from Las Vegas, they

222 Mallgrave, The Architect’s Brain, 78. 223 Ibid., 78. 224 Ibid., 79. 225 Theodor Lipps’ Aesthetics (1903-1906) and Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (1908). 226 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1997), 15. 227 Ibid., 4. 228 Ibid., 13. 229 Ibid., 14. 230 Ibid. 14. 276

specifically directed their criticism against such ideas as connotation, physiognomy and expression in architecture:

Modern architecture (and Crawford Manor as its exemplar) has tended to shun the heraldic and denotative in architecture and to exaggerate the physiognomic and connotative. Modern architecture uses expressive ornament and shuns explicit symbolic ornament.231

However, critics have observed that “Donald Weismann, Vincent Scully, Robert Venturi, and Colin Rowe are only a few of the better known practitioners of empathetic seeing.”232 It is worth noting that in his first book, Venturi repeatedly referenced ideas about vitality and even expressionism. In the “gentle manifesto” at the beginning of Complexity and Contradiction he stated: “By embracing contradiction as well as complexity, I aim for vitality as well as validity. ... I am for messy vitality over obvious unity.”233 Nonetheless, his take on empathy is primarily visual and generally brackets other forms of embodiment or relationship between the subject and the object. Later in the second chapter, Venturi wrote:

Gothic tracery and Rococo rocaille were not only expressively valid in relation to the whole, but came from a valid showing-off of hand skills and expressed a vitality derived from the immediacy and individuality of the method. … [Alvar Aalto’s Imatra Church] represents a justifiable expressionism different from the willful picturesqueness of the haphazard structure and spaces of Giovanni Michelucci’s recent church for the Autostrada. Aalto’s complexity is part of the program and structure of the whole rather than a device justified only by the desire for expression.234

Vitality is that aspect of variety intrinsic to architectural objects or cities that, implicitly, makes them interesting. “An artful discord gives vitality to architecture,” wrote Venturi in the sixth chapter, that on “the conventional element.”235 Mundane and ordinary elements of

231 Venture, Scott Brown and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 101. 232 Mark Jarzombek. “De-Scribing the Language of Looking: Wölfflin and the History of Aesthetic,” Assemblage No. 23 (April 1994): 35. 233 Venture, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 16. 234 Ibid., 18. In the second edition, he revisits his position and adds the following footnote: “I have visited Giovanni Michelluci’s Church of the Autostrada since writing these words, and I now realize it is an extremely beautiful and effective building. I am therefore sorry I made this unsympathetic comparison.” 235 Ibid., 41. 277

architecture and landscape also possess a vitality that architects need to account for rather than ignore.236 Unlike architecture, Pop Art has recognized that “common place elements are often the main source of the occasional variety and vitality of our cities … .”237 The vitality of Times Square is not unlike that of Piazza San Marco in Venice.238 The intersections between a diagonal avenue like Broadway and the gridiron of Manhattan became events that “added validity and tension” to the overall regular plan of the city.239 The book’s closing statement is a manifesto for revisiting the everyday and the ordinary in architecture and the city: “And it is perhaps from the everyday landscape, vulgar and disdained, that we can draw the complex and contradictory order that is valid and vital for our architecture as an urbanistic whole.”240

For Venturi, vitality indicates the quality of a formal composition, but it also relates to that similarity between subject and object that was central to Vischer and Worringer’s concept of empathy. Gothic and Rococo express vitality because of the extraordinary craftsmanship embodied in the work. The vitality of Times Square results from the variety of architectural events embodied within the hustle-and-bustle of daily life, which people experience directly. Similarly, the everyday and the ordinary in architecture and landscape resonate with the everyday and ordinary emotions experienced by ordinary people. While Venturi will explicitly stay away from evoking emotions and feelings, his insistence on the vitality of architectural and urban forms echoes the concept of empathy. The main difference, however, is that he approaches it through disembodied symbols expected to create visual connections between the viewing subject and the object.

Heinrich Wölfflin: the unified whole; the interesting as illusion. In Complexity and Contradiction, Venturi never clarified his brief reference to Wölfflin.241 However, he was probably familiar with Wölfflin’s influential books, by then available to the English audience: Renaissance and Baroque (first published in German in 1888, but translated in English only in

236 Ibid., 42-43. 237 Ibid., 44. 238 Ibid., 54. 239 Ibid., 64. 240 Ibid., 104. 241 “This subordination of parts corresponds to Wölfflin’s ‘unified unity’ of the Baroque – which he contrasts with the ‘multiple unity’ of the Renaissance.” (Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 90). 278

1964242); Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (first published in German in 1915 and translated into English in 1932243); and The Sense of Form in Art: A Comparative Psychological Study (first published in German in 1931 and translated into English in 1958244).

While discussing the main differences between two architectural styles along with their characteristics, Wölfflin’s Renaissance and Baroque offered a specific hypothesis for understanding stylistic changes. Although Venturi largely departed from Wölfflin’s propositions, I believe that several of his underlying tenets have, if indirectly, found their echo in Complexity and Contradiction, namely ideas about the boring, the interesting, and the necessity of change.

In Wölfflin’s Renaissance and Baroque, he defined the latter as a painterly style, “that which lends itself to being painted, that which without addition would serve as a motif for the painter.”245 This idea was further developed in Principles of Art History, where he proposed five pairs of concepts to explain the transition from the style of the sixteenth century to that of the seventeenth.246 The first pair described the difference between what Wölfflin called the linear to the painterly: in the former case (which corresponds to the Renaissance) objects are perceived through their outlines, contours, and limits, whereas in the latter (which corresponds to the Baroque), objects tend to look limitless, their distinct boundaries are blurred, and things merge with each other.247

A classical temple, or by extension, a Renaissance building, “would look monotonous in a picture” (or in other words, boring) and “an artist painting it on a canvas today would have great difficulty in making it look interesting.”248 In contrast, a “Baroque building is more animated” and lends itself easier to more dramatic effects of light and shadow.249 The painterly

242 Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979 [1964]). 243 Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M.D. Hottinger (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1950). 244 Heinrich Wölfflin, The Sense of Form in Art: A Comparative Psychological Study, trans. A. Muehsam and N. A. Shatan (New York: Chelsea Publishing Company, 1958). 245 Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, 29. 246 These five pairs were: linear and painterly, plane and recession, closed and open form, multiplicity and unity, clearness and unclearness. (Wölfflin, Principles of Art History). 247 Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, 14. 248 Ibid., 29. 249 Ibid., 29. 279

quality of a building derives from a sense of moving and restless masses, of jumping and swaying forms.

In short, the severe style of architecture makes its effect by what it is, that is by its corporeal substance, while painterly architecture acts through what it appears to be, that is, an illusion of movement. Neither of these extremes, of course, exists in a pure state. Painterliness is based on an illusion of movement.250

What makes a building interesting, worthy of representation, is its ability to create an illusion, to appear as something else, something different. Ultimately, it wasn’t the depth of the wall in Baroque architecture, neither “the dissolution of the regular,”251 the elusiveness, the lack of definition,252 nor the drama of light and shadow, that Venturi “learned from” this style, but rather a sense of the interesting derived from the play between what things are and what they appear to be. This association of interesting and deceitful was already present, as we have seen earlier in this chapter, in the aesthetic theories of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard.

Wölfflin maintained that apparent accidents as design techniques infuse architecture with greater vitality – a term that, as we have already seen, Venturi used frequently, and which translated into a deliberate strategy applied in his projects.253 Comparing Renaissance and Baroque surfaces, Wölfflin wrote: “…the clearly-defined surfaces of the old style were purposely broken up with ‘accidental’ effects to give them greater vitality.”254 Later in the book, Wölfflin will call this an “intentional dissonance.”255

The formal relationship of parts to whole was central to Wölfflin’s understanding of the differences between Renaissance and Baroque. In addition to the characteristics already mentioned, he found that it was ‘maniera grande’ that best expressed the nature of Baroque architecture; borrowed from Giorgio Vasari, the term was used by Wölfflin to describe two main elements that distinguished Baroque from Renaissance: an increase in size and a simpler, more

250 Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, 30. 251 Ibid., 32. 252 Ibid., 33. 253 “… an ‘accidental’ drapery fold or something of the sort must be introduced to enliven it [the flat surfaces]. Unpainterly are the uniform series and the regular interval; a rhythmic succession is better, and better still is an apparently quite accidental grouping, depending entirely on the precise distribution of masses of light.” (Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, 32) 254 Ibid., 35. 255 Ibid., 68. 280

unified composition. Through architectural examples, Wölfflin showed how these two composition principles worked hand in hand: as the size increases and the parts get bigger, large unarticulated masses rather than separate parts become the main elements of the composition. By way of consequence, larger buildings called for simpler details.256 Unlike the tripartite horizontal division of the Renaissance façade, the Baroque façade became a “unified body.”257 Wölfflin wrote:

After the activity of Michelangelo and Raphael in the Vatican, painting, sculpture and architecture increased steadily in scale; until beauty was conceived of entirely in terms of the colossal. Gracefulness and diversity gave way to a new simplicity, aiming only at large masses; the whole is permeated by a powerful and unifying force and nothing suggests a composition made up of separate parts.258

In Complexity and Contradiction, Wölfflin’s principle of the “vertically unified façade” (or what Venturi calls “unified unity”) works hand in hand with the Gestalt principles: Wölfflin claimed that Renaissance design principles worked with parts that prefigured the form of the whole; in contrast, the Baroque worked with increasingly larger parts, where the whole was vaster than the sum of its parts, which in turn, will become one of the most important principles of Gestalt psychology. Wölfflin found the aesthetic appeal of this approach in “the resolution of the discords” and reversed the direction of the relationship of parts to whole: no longer are the parts indicative of the whole as in Renaissance architecture, but, instead, “only through the whole could the individual part gain value and meaning.”259

Again, this tension between conflicting parts constitutes a core principle of Venturi’s architectural theory and practice. The “messy vitality” and the “obligation toward the difficult whole” that he proposes in his “gentle manifesto” recall Wölfflin’s interpretation of Baroque architecture.260 In this context, even the quote from August Hecksher (“The equilibrium must be created out of opposites”261) is in tune with the same ideas. Tension, rather than serenity, should

256 Ibid., 40. 257 Ibid., 40. 258 Ibid., 39. 259 Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, 70. 260 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 16. 261 Ibid., 16. 281

be characteristic of the architecture of the time.262 Complexity and contradiction should result from the association between what an image is and it appears to be.263

The examples continue throughout the book and are also made explicit in the eleventh chapter, the one which presents the work of the firm. The project for the Pearson House (1957) (Figure 3.4.) played with “contrasting spatial layers,”264 whereas the renovation of the James B. Duke House (1959) (Figure 3.5.) attempted to create harmony through “contrasting juxtapositions.”265 Distortion and a game of make-believe are at work in the headquarters of the North Penn Visiting Nurse Association (1960) (Figure 3.6.), where the straight retaining wall and the rectangular box are distorted, and the scale of the windows makes the building appear bigger than it actually is.266 The side façades of the Guild House (1960-1963) are “contrastingly intricate,” the antenna appears real, but is, in fact, fake, the double-hung windows are “unusually big” and consequently express tension on the elevations (Figure 3.7.).267 The Vanna Venturi house (1962) (Figure 3.8.) illustrates most of the lessons learned from Baroque and Mannerist precedents: complex and distorted interior spaces, broken symmetries, tension between two vertical elements (the fireplace-chimney and the stair).268 The house is open and close, simple and complex, big and small.269

Heinrich Wölfflin and Adolf Göller: empathy and the “law of jading.” The middle chapter of Wölfflin’s Renaissance and Baroque inquired into a topic of utmost relevance for nineteenth century art history: what causes the change in style? His answer was influenced by his belief in the theory of empathy between architectural forms and human emotions.

Wölfflin asked: “Where are the sources of baroque? … Why did Renaissance come to an end? … Why was it followed, particularly, by Baroque? … Why did it happen this way?”270 He

262 Ibid., 17 263 Ibid., 20. 264 Ibid., 106. 265 Ibid., 107 266 Ibid., 109. 267 Ibid., 116. 268 Ibid., 118. 269 Ibid., 118-119. 270 Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, 73. 282

proposed two answers. The first one was a critique of a theory on the boring and the interesting. In contrast, the second one introduced ideas about experience, the human body, and practice.

Wölfflin’s first answer was a critique of Adolf Göller’s theory on changes in style. In late nineteenth century, Göller was a professor of architecture at the Technische Hochshule in Stuttgart and in 1887 delivered a lecture titled “What is the Cause of Perpetual Style Change in Architecture?”271 He put forth an architectural theory grounded in aesthetics and empathy, making the argument that architecture was the art of “visible pure form, considered free of any ideal content” and “an inherently pleasurable, meaningless, play of lines or of light and shade.”272 Göller was mainly concerned with the formation of styles and the invention of architectural forms, which he saw as a cyclical process: it had started far back in antiquity and could be defined through the succession of “advent, flowering, and passing of families of form.”273 His approach was an evolutionary one, based on progress, development, and decline. He acknowledged the difference between works of painting and sculpture, and works of architecture, where the former generate aesthetic pleasure derived from reflection, but the latter “are beautiful without thought content.”274 Göller was a proponent of architecture as language and drew comparisons between the two. The sound of language, rather than its meaning, is what pleases us. Likewise, he it is not the content of architecture’s formal language that is interesting, but “the pleasing play of lines or of light and shade.”275

Göller introduced the concept of “memory image,” defined as the first moment in the formation of a style, when people get gradually accustomed to certain forms that they will eventually find pleasurable.276 This process, however, does not go on indefinitely and comes to end with what Göller called the law of “jading:” as people become more and more familiar with

271 Adolf Göller, “What Is the Cause of Perpetual Style Change in Architecture?” in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics 1873-1893, eds. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomu (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994). 272 Adolf Göller, “What Is the Cause of Perpetual Style Change in Architecture?,” 195. 273 Ibid., 193. 274 Ibid., 198. 275 Ibid., 198. “Why should the content of architecture’s formal language – the structural achievement – be particularly interesting in itself? If our emotions were moved by mere statics and mechanics, then a machine would be the greatest architectural work of art! We see structural achievement even without decorative forms. If the interest resided in that achievement itself, what purpose would the decorative language of form serve?” 276 “The sharper the memory image becomes etched into the memory patterns of individuals, the more clarity it gains, the more these particular forms become pleasurable.” Harry Francis Mallgrave. The Architect’s Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 82. 283

these forms, the memory image is complete, the erstwhile pleasure experienced by spectators and architects is gone and the style becomes exhausted.277 He explained that once this jading settles in, the architects have only a few options to move forward. Firstly, they look for new arrangements of the same volumes, partis and decorations or intensify the already “jaded forms” – both of these strategies eventually lead to a baroque stage of the style. Once these options are worn out, architects end up simplifying the formal vocabulary in order to offer new forms that will generate new memory images, which will eventually follow the same cycle.278 Implicit in Göller’s proposition was a tendency to regard human beings as a rather amorphous group without agency and no individualities.

What Göller described as the law of jading was a form of boredom that connected architectural forms and human beings. The underlying argument was that the formation of a style was the result of a constant search for the interesting understood as newness and novelty, in response to the jaded (or boring) forms of the past. Critical to his view was the unquestioned acceptance of the pleasing nature of all things novel and the universal legitimacy of the law of jading:

The charm of novelty is well known, as is the way habit may blunt the impression of many forms; but it has been necessary to seek out the hidden law and its causes in order to make it possible to draw a conclusion. It has to be shown that not even the most ideal form, considered as a purely optical event, can be an exception. For most persons, the charm of a beautiful form is not lost with its novelty; conversely, it has to be shown that jading is not simply an accidental phenomenon, nor is it based on personal predispositions or individual aberration, but rather on a universally valid law.279

Moreover, the jading was conceptualized as the essential driving force behind architectural progress: “Without jading, nothing new would ever have been sought nor anything more beautiful ever found. Had we always found beautiful what was once accepted as the most beautiful, no new architecture could ever have arisen.”280 Lacking the interesting found in new

277 Ibid., 82. 278 Ibid., 82-83. 279 Göller, 206 (italics in original.) 280 Göller, 217. 284

forms, the entire history of architecture would have remained monotonous and boring.281 Once engaged in the ideology of the interesting, boredom is necessary the result.

Coincidentally, in the description of the entry for the National Football Hall of Fame competition Venturi employed a language that echoed Göller’s theory on the law of jading. The project was published in 1968, first in Architectural Forum (April) and then in Architecture Canada (October).282 Dubbed a “billdingboard involving movies, relics, and space,” Venturi’s project attempted to address the almost-cult status of campus football along with the new mid- century sensibilities developed around movies, billboards, and cars (Figure 3.9.):

Our mixed media include symbolic and representational elements, that is, billboards and words, along with the abstract elements of space, form, and structure. Symbols with architecture enrich meaning. They can evoke the instant associations crucial for today’s vast space, fast speeds, complex programs and, perhaps, jaded senses which respond only to bold stimuli.283

The “jaded senses” of the moderns signal the moment of crisis that Göller had identified earlier as the end of a stylistic era. The use of language aside, Venturi’s project embodies the tension between architectural forms of the past, historic precedents, and the technology of the future. References to Gothic cathedrals, Baroque villas, and Piazza del Campidoglio populate the design along with projection screens and computer graphics, which foreshadow the huge impact of digital technologies in the upcoming decades. Contrasts of scale and surface decoration, openings that violently puncture the whole recall Wölfflin’s theory about the “resolution of the discords.” Never made explicit in these terms, the viewers’ anticipated perception of the building was grounded in the recognition of common symbols and what Göller has defined as the “memory image.”

Returning to Wölfflin, he refuted Göller’s theory of “blunted sensibility” and did not believe that it offered a legitimate answer to his own question about causes of stylistic changes,

281 Göller, 217. 282 Robert Venturi, “A Bill-ding-board Involving Movies, Relics, and Space,” Architectural Forum 128 (April 1968): 74-79; Robert Venturi, “Entry for the National Football Hall of Fame Competition,” Architecture Canada 45, No. 10 (October 1968): 50-53. 283 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, A View from the Campidoglio: Selected Essays 1953-1984 (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1984), 15. 285

and, more specifically, the origins of Baroque.284 Wölfflin’s main criticism was that Göller reduced human beings full of vitality to “form-experiencing” creatures, “enjoying, tiring, demanding fresh stimuli.”285 He maintained that “an action or experience not conditioned by our general responses to life, our personality and our whole being, is inconceivable.”286 Where Göller denied the agency of human beings, Wölfflin reinforced the power of the individual. He argued that Göller’s “jaded formal perceptiveness” could not account for the extraordinary changes brought about in Baroque – they were rather the result of a “general numbing of the nerves,” “a universal loss of refined perceptiveness caused by a high degree of emotional indulgence, which rendered all less obtrusive stimuli ineffective.”287 Moreover, for Wölfflin, Göller’s theory had the underlying hypothesis of a state of constant change in which the role of the architect was to produce something novel by varying the grouping of masses, the shape and combination of individual forms.”288

Wölfflin’s critique of Göller was implicitly directed against a theory of the boring and the interesting focused on the search for novelty in architectural forms. He criticized the reductionist claim that human beings simply respond to external stimuli (which later will lie at the core of behaviorism) and have no role in shaping their experience. What he proposed, instead, was to center architectural experience on what is the most familiar and comprehensible fact, specific to each individual, yet also common to all: the human body itself.289 He wrote:

…it is clear that architecture, an art of corporeal masses, can relate only to man as a corporeal being. It is an expression of its time in so far as it reflects the corporeal essence of man and his particular habits of deportment and movement, it does not matter whether they are light and playful, or solemn and grave, or whether his attitude to life is agitated or calm; in a word, architecture expresses the ‘Lebensgefühl’ of an epoch. As an art, however, it will give an ideal enhancement of his ‘Lebensgefühl;’ in other words, it will express man’s aspirations.290

284 Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, 73-76. 285 Ibid., 74. 286 Ibid., 74. 287 Ibid., 75. 288 Ibid., 76. 289 “We judge every object by analogy with our own bodies.” Ibid., 77. 290 Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, 78. 286

For Wölfflin, Lebensgefühl (“vital feeling”) mediates between the forms perceived by an individual and their physiological body, and designates a type of energy experienced by the body in movement.291 (Lebensgefühl was also an important concept in Kant’s philosophy. He proposed that a subject’s aesthetic perception of a building depends on how the building affects the individual’s “vital feeling,” creating pleasure or displeasure.292) Rejecting positivist theories that traced the origin of forms to technical causes, Wölfflin argued that understanding architecture from the perspective of the human body provides an expression of the spiritual. He recognized, however, that Baroque architecture “cannot be seen in terms of the human body” and it has “no sense of the significance of individual forms.”293 The essence of the style consists in the effects of lights and shadows and the painterly quality of the whole rather than the intimate and empathetic response to individual forms that was specific to Renaissance.

While Wölfflin’s main concern was related to architectural forms, he was seeking to understand them in relation to moods and human emotions. His approach rejected positivist theories and proposed a body-centered perspective on architecture. “The body is the medium that affords the grounding of knowledge. It provides the locus of a universal experience – thus its ‘exactness’ – that unites object and viewer around the symmetrically placed axis of experience.”294 Critics have made the argument that postwar egalitarianism has favored empathy theories in opposition to metaphysical history or neoclassical aesthetics because of the their focus on physical artifacts rather than abstract ideas.295

Architectural critic and historian Mark Jarzombek has shown that it is when vitalism and vitality take a self-fulfilling and self-referential turn, as it is the case in Venturi’s work, that they actually change into “vividness” and become irrelevant.296

It was as if the vitalist argument within the formalist position became autonomous and demanded to be fed more and more ‘complexity’ as an increasingly rigorous test of its potency – all in the search for “vividness” … . [The argument] assumes that we will

291 Vlad Ionescu, “Architectural Symbolism: Body and Space in Heinrich Wölfflin and Wilhelm Worringer,” Architectural Histories, 4(1), (2016): 4. 292 Ibid., 5 293 Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, 85. 294 Jarzombek, “De-Scribing the Language of Looking: Wölfflin and the History of Aesthetic,” 36. 295 Ibid., 35. 296 Ibid., 53. 287

always be precisely human, that we will be aroused by physical forms, especially if they are “alive,” complex, and worthy of the male gaze that continually has to prove its power of observation.297

Adding to that, I propose that it is not only the autonomy of the object that weakens the claim for vitality and empathy in Venturi’s theory, but also the reduction of architecture to an aesthetic object described in terms of the dichotomy boring – interesting. Venturi’s reading of Wölfflin was certainly biased and reductive as he chose those specific aspects of his work that supported his own views, namely the creative tension between discordant elements and the relationship of parts to whole. At the same time, it was through Wölfflin that Venturi might have become acquainted with empathy theories, ideas about moods and architecture, and Göller’s hypothesis about changes in style being determined by a cyclical loop between the boring and the interesting. In Complexity and Contradiction Venturi did not make any explicit claims about empathy, nor did he address ideas about embodiment or expressive moods. “Less is a bore,” however, echoes Göller’s proposition that exhausted, jaded “memory images” fail to resonate with people’s feelings and call for radical changes. Likewise, Venturi’s emphasis on the irrelevance of certain analogies dear to modern architects (such as, for instance, those between Japanese pavilions and contemporary houses298) indicates a similar sense of exhaustion with certain forms that have turned obsolete and require critical changes.

Sigfried Giedion: confusion and boredom. A particular thread that carried Wölfflin’s legacy into twentieth century architectural thinking was his doctoral student, Sigfried Gieidon. Giedion was critical of positions such as Göller’s, who associated stylistic changes with the jading of forms, and was interested, instead, in examining the shared grounds of different epochs. In the introduction to the 1967 edition of Space, Time and Architecture (first published in 1941), Gieidon described mid-century architecture as being governed by “confusion and boredom.”299

297 Ibid., 53. 298 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 17. 299 “In the sixties a certain confusion exists in contemporary architecture, as in painting; a kind of pause, even a kind of exhaustion. Everyone is aware of it. Fatigue is normally accompanied by uncertainty, what to do and where to go. Fatigue is the mother of indecision, opening the door to escapism, to superficialities of all kinds. … A kind of playboy-architecture became en vogue: an architecture treated as playboys treat life, jumping from one sensation to another and quickly bored with everything.” (Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture (1967), xxxii.) 288

His concern with the state of architecture was not new – he had published an earlier version of this introduction in 1961 as a preface to his Constancy, Change and Architecture, a small volume based on the talk he had delivered the same year at Harvard for the first of an annual series of Gropius Lectures.300 Giedion’s talk presented some of the arguments he had already made in Space, Time and Architecture and had two parts, “The Beginnings of Art” and “The Beginnings of Architecture.” It was prefaced by his thoughts on “the present disturbing fashions in architecture”301 that closely resemble the chapter on “Confusion and Boredom” from 1967.302 Having its starting point in the critique of “the fashions of 1960 with their lacework of heterogeneous historical relics,” Giedion’s ultimate goal was to understand the relationship of constancy and change in architecture and to search for those invariables of human nature.303 Implicit in the notion of fashion was his critique of novelty and change, of elements that, quickly becoming outdated, demand to be replaced by other, newer and more interesting, forms.

Giedion acknowledged his interest in one main problem: “the formation of the man of to- day” and more specifically, the “architecture which provides the corporal and the psychic shelter for this formation.”304 His inquiry is related to Wölfflin’s question about the causes of stylistic changes and, as we have already seen, his positioning of human corporeality and human aspirations at the core of changes in arts and architecture. Giedion reiterated his argument from Space, Time and Architecture that showed the dichotomy – widened in the nineteenth century – between methods of thinking and methods of feeling; he proposed to bridge that gap by looking at the unchanging elements of human nature and finding the equilibrium “between inner and outer reality.”305 An advocate of abstraction as the thread that tied together the primitive and the modern man, Giedion built upon Wilhelm Worringer’s thesis on the art of abstraction and the art of empathy. Each of the two parts of the lecture discussing the beginnings of arts and, respectively, of architecture, start with a section on “continuity and change.” In both arts and

300 Sigfried Giedion, Constancy, Change and Architecture. 301 Ibid., 3. 302 “There is at present a certain confusion in contemporary architecture. Just as in painting, there seems to be a kind of pause, even a kind of exhaustion. Everyone is aware of it. Fatigue is normally accompanied by uncertainty, what to do, where to go. Fatigue is the mother of indecision, of quivering.” (Giedion, Constancy, Change and Architecture, 3). Compare with note 195. 303 Ibid., 4-6. 304 Giedion, Constancy, Change and Architecture, 4. 305 Ibid., 6. 289

architecture, the continuity across time and space is manifested through the longing shared by all human beings for signs and symbols.

The analysis of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s St. George Church in Bloomsbury, London from Complexity and Contradiction is a nod to and a hidden critique of, Giedion’s influential book: “In St. George, Bloomsbury … the contradictory axes inside become alternatingly dominant or recessive as the observer moves within them, so that the same space changes meaning. Here is another dimension of ‘space, time and architecture’ which involves the multiple focus.”306 (Figure 3.10) Venturi referenced again Space, Time and Architecture first in relation to Giedion’s studies of balloon frames307 and then as an opportunity to criticize Giedion’s reading of Aalto’s work. Unlike Giedion, who saw Aalto’s architecture as a “combination of standardization with irrationality,” Venturi looked at it as contradictory and “an artful recognition of the circumstantial and the contextual … .”308 An explicit critique of Giedion’s own modern bias came from Venturi and Scott Brown in Learning from Las Vegas when they wrote: “For us the most boring pavilions at Expo ’67 were those that corresponded to the progressive structures of nineteenth-century world’s fairs celebrated by Sigfried Giedion.”309

Techniques of the interesting: appearance, combinatory techniques, excess and overload. Venturi and Scott Brown have remained relatively consistent over the years in terms of their theoretical stance, beliefs, and practical approach to architecture and urban design. While it was in Learning from Las Vegas that they clearly formulated the question “Is boring architecture interesting?” the concern with the relevance of this apparent contradiction for our discipline had started much earlier.

Through the work of Venturi and Scott Brown we begin to understand the specificity of the category of the interesting in architecture. The emphasis on appearance results in the autonomy of the architectural object. Through combinatory techniques, design strategies turn

306 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 32. 307 Ibid., 38. 308 “Giedion has written of Aalto’s unique ‘combination of standardization with irrationality so that standardization is no longer master but servant.’” (Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 44.) 309 Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 2nd edition, 151. 290

into self-referential and normative practices. Lastly, the bias for formal excess and overload is often legitimized in terms of complexity.

As shown in the first chapter, in his “gentle manifesto” at the beginning of Complexity and Contradiction Venturi deliberately introduced the pair boring – interesting as a way to make an argument about his personal, subjective (yet highly relevant) approach to architecture. (Despite the seemingly “gentle” tone, through words such as “obligation,” “truth,” “must,” he urges the readers to endorse his position.)310 Various forms of the dichotomy boring – interesting underline Venturi’s argument: exclusion – inclusion, explicit – implicit, oversimplification – complexity, reduction – simplicity, clarity – ambiguity, banality – variety, serenity – tension, etc.311 Justifying his argument for a complex architecture, Venturi wrote:

The desire for a complex architecture, with its attendant contradictions, is not only a reaction to the banality or prettiness of current architecture. It is an attitude common in the Mannerist periods: the sixteenth century in Italy or the Hellenistic period of Classical art, and is also a continuous strain seen in such diverse architects as Michelangelo, Palladio …, some architects of the Shingle Style, Furness, Sullivan, Lutyens, and recently, Le Corbusier, Aalto, Kahn, and others.312

If unknowingly, Venturi embraced Wölfflin’s theory about the evolution of a style and the shift from one style to another.313 Although having had a certain evolutionary bias, Wölfflin had questioned the development of a style in terms of “rise, height and decline”314 and argued that what comes after a particular style should not be regarded as a lesser art, but rather a completely different one.315 Venturi proposed to validate his new approach to architecture not simply as a reaction against a state-of-affairs in architecture that he found problematic, but also as a natural evolution, which, as historical evidence showed, was moving toward something entirely different. The new is ultimately interesting not because it is simply different, but mostly because it belongs to a tradition of similar breakthrough moments that have happened throughout

310 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 16. 311 Ibid., 16-19. 312 Ibid., 19. 313 Wölfflin: Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art; The Sense of Form in Art: A Comparative Psychological Study; Renaissance and Baroque. 314 Wölfflin: Principles of Art History, 14. 315 Ibid., 14. 291

time. By having identified complexity in earlier moments in architectural history, he situated his own approach within a legitimizing genealogy.

Boring, interesting, complex are intertwined both in the precedent studies and the descriptions of Venturi’s own projects, both at architectural and urban scales. This is how Venturi presents the comparison between road-town and Levittown:

Is there [in Piazza San Marco – my note] not a similar validity to the vitality Times Square in which the jarring inconsistencies of buildings and billboards are contained within the consistent order of the space itself? It is when honky-tonk spills out beyond spatial boundaries to the no-man’s land of roadtown, that it becomes chaos and blight. (If in God’s Own Junkyard Peter Blake had chosen examples of roadside landscape for his book which were less extremely “bad,” his point, at least involving the banality of roadside architecture, would ironically have been stronger.) It seems our fate now to be faced with either the endless inconsistencies of roadtown, which is chaos, or the infinite consistency of Levittown […] which is boredom. In roadtown we have a false complexity; in Levittown, a false simplicity. One thing is clear – from such false consistency real cities will never grow. Cities, like architecture, are complex and contradictory.316

The “false complexity” of roadtown suggests that the agglomeration of buildings and signs without spatial limitations is deceptively interesting or, in other words, that without a framework, variety and diversity turn into disorder. (This idea is first presented in the second chapter, “Complexity and Contradiction vs. Simplification and Picturesqueness:” “A false complexity has recently countered the false simplicity of an earlier Modern architecture.”317) The argument on “false complexity” and “false simplicity” is developed at the end of the seventh chapter, “Contradiction Adapted,” that proposes design techniques to accommodate differences and irregularities.318 The main strategy suggested is combinatory techniques. Precedents are analyzed in minute detail from strictly formal perspectives: the circumstantial distortion (such as

316 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 54. 317 Ibid., 18. 318 Ibid., 45-54. 292

the distortions of the plans of Palladio’s palaces to adapt to the streets of Vicenza319); the expedient device (an accident within a rigorous order such as the post in the inner portal at Vézelay which blocks the axis to the altar320) (Figure 3.11.); the eventful exception (such as the displaced column in Le Corbusier’s plan for Vila Savoye) (Figure 3.12.); the dialogue between the rectilinear order and the diagonal (such as Kahn’s Goldenberg House project)321 (Figure 3.13.).

The entire conversation is built around individual buildings, but the last paragraph proposes that similar principles can also be applied to urban design. It is in this context that the comparisons between Piazza San Marco and Times Square and between roadtown and Levittown emerge. Just as the various techniques to accommodate irregularities spawn the interesting only within a rigorous architectural order, so the interesting (or the exception, the distortion, the accident) at urban scale is manifested only within well-defined boundaries. Complexity is not chaos (or endless inconsistencies) and simplicity is not boredom (or infinite consistency). Earlier in the treatise, he had written that intricate forms are not necessarily complex.322 The interesting (or the complex), both in cities and individual buildings, results from a formal play between order and exceptions to order. Nowhere in his careful analysis does Venturi bring up the materiality of architecture or the dynamism of city life. While he does mention the “violent contradictions in scale, rhythms, and textures” in Piazza San Marco, the focus remains on autonomous objects and the visual perception of their formal composition.

To demonstrate the application of the theory to his work, Venturi employed the same principles and parameters in the description of his own projects in the eleventh chapter of the book.

The first instance in the account of his designs when he emphasized ideas about complexity was the design for the Headquarters Building for the North Penn Visiting Nurse Association (1960) (Figure 3.6.). The building is designed as a distorted box that is both simple and complex, the positioning of the windows on the façade is complex to counteract the simplicity of the box, the main entrance – through its design and location from the side court – is

319 Ibid., 45. 320 Ibid., 46. 321 Ibid., 50. 322 Ibid., 18. 293

complex, as is the program itself.323 The project has gone through numerous iterations. While several elements have remained consistent (e.g. the general layout, the diagonal wall, and to a certain extent the thick street façade / storage-wall), it was the street elevation that has been carefully studied (Figure 3.14.). So what does the claim for complexity really indicate? In a sequence of two-dimensional studies, these iterations show a purely formal arrangement of shapes and their disposition on the surface of the wall. The latter is treated almost as a canvas without depth where cutouts of various sizes and forms are arranged in different combinations. Complexity seems to result from the formal variety of window patterns along with the treatment of the entrance – the intersection of a half-circle and a triangle.

This first account on complexity in Venturi’s own work shows how he resorts primarily to formal organizations of geometric elements as a means to build an “interesting” whole. Visual perception is the only way to relate with the work. The inhabitant becomes first and foremost a viewer. Architectural experience is thus reduced to visual signs. Complexity is hardly complex at all.

The last two projects shown at the end of the book bring up the key arguments of the dichotomy boring – interesting deriving from nineteenth century aesthetic theories. The design for the YMCA building (1965) (Figure 3.15), which was part of a larger complex in the small town of North Canton, Ohio that included the town hall and the extension of the existing public library, is described in a Wölfflin-ian manner almost as a Baroque building accomplishing the goal of a unified body:

The openings in the wall were few and big to increase the scale. The relationships of the openings which are the dominant elements of the façade make up a relatively constant rhythm without focus in the center or emphasis at the terminations. This characteristic also gives greater unity and scale to the building.324

Not unlike a painterly Baroque building where the clear distinctions between masses or between elements are blurred, the YMCA building does not have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but, is, instead, “just one continuous thing resulting from the constant, even boring,

323 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 109. 324 Ibid., 126. 294

rhythm.”325 This “boring rhythm” is constructed on the free-standing wall acting as a front façade and a buffer zone between the building and the plaza (Figure 3.15). Evidently, the “boring rhythm” and its larger scale are meant to be appealing because they signal something else: a nod to the existing factory and to the city hall. The former is situated opposite the YMCA and is overall bigger, but “smaller in its individual parts,” whereas the latter, is situated on the other side of the plaza and is smaller. 326 The boring becomes interesting or complex in a very specific context: “A contrapuntal juxtaposition contrasts the ‘boredom’ of the false façade with the ‘chaos’ of the back façade which reflects the interior circumstantial complexities.”327 The boredom of the false façade is different from the boredom of Levittown described earlier, just as the chaos of the back façade is unlike the chaos of roadtown. Neither boredom nor chaos are mere rhetorical devices, but rather stand here for specific design tools expressed as combinatory techniques applied to formal compositions in elevation.

The last project in the sequence of twelve showed in the closing chapter of Complexity and Contradiction is Venturi and Rauch’s 1966 proposal for the Copley Square competition (Figure 3.16). The dichotomy boring – interesting appears again at the level of the formal composition through the relationship between their proposal for an ordered grid and the existing buildings on the site: “In the context of the ‘boring’ consistent grid inside the square the chaotic buildings to the north become ‘interesting’ and vital elements of the composition.”328 The “boring grid” provides that specific element which makes the difference between Times Square and Piazza San Marco, and roadtown: the ordered background. Venturi describes the project as a reflection, at a different scale, of Boston’s gridiron street pattern.329 Thus the proposed grid acts at an empathetic level: intimately knowing the large scale of their city, the occupants of the plaza would understand the logic embodied within this smaller scale design. In this context, interesting and vital become synonymous and a certain resonance between different scales is at work throughout the proposal. Operating at different levels, this mode of thinking is manifested in

325 Ibid., 126. 326 Ibid., 126. 327 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 126. 328 Ibid., 129. 329 “This grid reflects in miniature the gridiron pattern of the part of Boston surrounding Copley Square. It imitates the hierarchy of streets, big, little and medium found in the real city. Like the real gridiron city, it contains diagonal ‘avenues’ which facilitate circulation and whose juxtaposition creates exceptional, residual blocks.” (Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 129). 295

various instances: the circulation through the square replicates the circulation at urban level. The miniature replica in cast concrete of the existing Trinity Church is placed in front of the actual Trinity Church. What at an urban scale would be signs for adults, here are nursery rhymes for children, inscribed on walls at their own height (Figure 3.17).

The interesting, the vital, the complex grow from ambiguity and the blurring of boundaries in a way similar again to Wölfflin’s definition of the painterly. The issue of bringing things into focus or, on the contrary, of zooming out indicates a play between close-up and distance that resembles Wölfflin’s reading of Baroque architecture with its dissolution of lines and sharp contours:

…[t]here are more ways to see it [the grid]. It is like the intricate pattern of a plaid fabric. From a distance it is an overall repetitive pattern – from a great distance, indeed, it is a plain blur – but close-up it is intricate, varied and rich in pattern, texture, scale and color. […] It is a question of focus: as one moves around and through the composition, he can focus on different things and relationships in different ways. […] There is the opportunity for a variety of focuses, or rather for changing focus. […] Violent juxtapositions of blurred and sharp focuses come from levels of relationships which relate more or less to the whole, or in complex compositions, to wholes within wholes.330

One of Venturi’s most important claims in this project is “The main paradox of this design is that the boring pattern is interesting.”331 With what level of irony are we to interpret this statement? Is it simply a clever witticism meant to post-rationalize an otherwise common design approach? (As he briefly shows in the same text, grids have been employed in one form or another in countless architectural and urban interventions.) Is it a bitter-sweet way of justifying a position that he foresees as running against the architectural establishment? He had already used interesting in an ironic voice, suggesting that non-grid ways of using the piazza that claim to be “interesting, sensitive and human” are, in fact, just the opposite.332 The interesting, he implicitly warns us, is deceptive, just as it is deceptive to see the grid as boring.

330 Ibid., 130. 331 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition,, 130. 332 “There are probably more ways to use this square which is ‘just a grid’ than there are to use those which are interesting, sensitive and human.” (Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 130). 296

Venturi’s play between the boring and the interesting in his last two projects suggests multiple interpretations. With the emphasis on appearance (e.g. elevations) architectural objects become not only autonomous, but also somewhat deceitful, as things are not always what they appear to be. There is a question of scale involved in the dichotomy boring – interesting that requires alternative readings from far-away and close-up; in a manner similar to what Sianne Ngai has shown was occurring in the visual arts, these readings invite further conversation, discussion, and criticism. This mode of reading the work has a temporal dimension, where the inhabitant has a lengthy rather than immediate engagement with the project. This direction is different from the imminence of signs and symbols, one of the central ideas in the work of the Venturi – Scott Brown team. With a focus on design strategies based on formal arrangements of elements (windows, doors, frames, etc.) boring – interesting become self-referential, they are no longer a matter of relationship (although Venturi claims otherwise), but a matter of the autonomy of the work. The boring and the interesting become normative and foreshadow what will become explicit in later writings, such as Learning from Las Vegas, namely a mode of assessing architecture and design from a purely aesthetic and formalist perspective.

Boring and interesting or the duck and the decorated shed. That the boring and the interesting became criteria to evaluate Venturi and Scott Brown’s work was acknowledged both by Vincent Scully and Philip J. Finkelpearl, Venturi’s friend from Princeton and the one who introduced him to New Criticism and irony in literary studies. In a comprehensive review of several of Venturi and Scott Brown’s works, published in 1979, Finkelpearl made the argument that the “apparent oldness” of their works is, in fact, their “true newness.”333 Quoting Vincent Scully, he suggested that the rhetorical game between boring and interesting involves a deliberate strategy of deception where the new is disguised within the (apparently) old:

The authors of Learning from Las Vegas themselves ask the crucial question: “Is boring architecture interesting?” Vincent Scully’s answer in an essay in Werk-Architese (there

333 Philip J. Finkelpearl. “Contemporary Confrontations: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi; Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour; The Yale Mathematics Building Competition by Charles W. Moore, Nicholas Pyle, Venturi and Rauch, 1970-1977; Venturi and Rauch. 25 Öffentliche Bauten; Progressive Architecture, LVIII; Venturi and Rauch,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 38, No. 2 (May 1979), 203-205. 297

translated into German) is that their buildings are never boring “though they probably look that way – because they are truly new – to people who have been brought up on late International Style.”334

It was, indeed, in Learning from Las Vegas that Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour specifically addressed the question of the dichotomy boring – interesting in architecture. The first chapter (“Some Definitions Using the Comparative Method”) of Part II (titled “Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed”) ends with the section called “Is Boring Architecture Interesting?”335 At the beginning of the chapter the authors cite Andy Warhol’s much-quoted aphorism “I like boring things.”336

One of Venturi and Scott Brown’s most notable contributions to architectural theory is the dialectical opposition between the duck and the decorated shed used to describe (and simplify) architectural history through this dualism. Although both are deemed valid and are usually intertwined, the duck (or the building as symbol – Chartres cathedral) stands opposite the decorated shed (or the building with applied symbols – Palazzo Farnese).337 I propose, instead, that the duck and the decorated shed stand in the same relationship as the categories of boring and interesting. Illustrated through Venturi’s comparison between Paul Rudolph’s Crawford Manor and his own Guild House, the duck and the decorated shed constitute the most comprehensive architectural theory on the boring and the interesting. They tie together the emphasis on appearance, the use of combinatory techniques as generative strategies, and the preference for a surplus of architectural devices.

In the Wölfflin-ian manner of comparisons between Renaissance and Baroque, the chapter in Learning from Las Vegas titled “Some Definitions Using the Comparative Method” is entirely structured on dichotomies and polarities. Venturi’s training under the Beaux-Arts influence of Donald Drew Egbert and Jean Labatut at Princeton has marked his methodological bias for the didacticism of the comparative method. Comparison is justified through its dullness

334 Philip J. Finkelpearl. “Contemporary Confrontations,” 204. 335 Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 2nd edition, 93. 336 Ibid., 87. 337 Ibid., 87. 298

(“it is simple to the point of banality”338) and is applied throughout the entire chapter to two buildings: Rudolph’s Crawford Manor and Venturi’s Guild House (Figure 3.18).

In 1972 when Learning from Las Vegas was published, why did Venturi go back to a work that had been completed nine years earlier and thoroughly explained six years before (in Complexity and Contradiction), while many other projects have been finalized in the meantime? Why would he construct the entire argument around a building that belonged to a period which, in this very book, he was already calling into the question for not having been radical enough and for not having clearly illustrated the theoretical principles laid out in Complexity and Contradiction?339 Is it because, as the authors claim, Crawford Manor and Guild House were comparable in terms of program, size, and construction date, yet so fundamentally different?

While the claims for certain correspondences are, as we will see further, largely inaccurate, the two buildings are similar for reasons different from those exposed in the comparison. The whole point of this exhaustive comparison is to make an argument for the difference between the duck and the decorated shed, where Crawford Manor stands for the former and the Guild House for the latter. The published analysis conceals the true similarities between the two projects, which, in turn, reflect the similarities between the duck and the decorated shed. I believe that the two concepts, which have become so central to Venturi and Scott Brown’s architectural theories and through which they have re-conceptualized the entire history of architecture, as well as their own work, are not radically different. I will attempt to show how the duck and the decorated shed are closer in nature than they suggest, thus revealing a deeper connection with the dichotomy boring – interesting.

Returning to the comparison between Crawford Manor and Guild House will help shed light on the relationship between the duck and the decorated shed. First, as the authors of

338 Ibid., 87. 339 “Let us describe our own experience as architects to explain how we came to ugly and ordinary architecture. after the appearance of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, we began to realize that few of our firm’s buildings were complex and contradictory, at least not in their purely architectural qualities of space and structure as opposed to their symbolic content. We had failed to fit into our buildings double-functioning or vestigial elements, circumstantial distortions, expedient devices, eventful exceptions, exceptional diagonals, things in things, crowded or contained intricacies, linings or layerings, residual spaces, redundant spaces, ambiguities, inflections, dualities, difficult wholes, or the phenomena of both-end. There was little in our work of inclusion, inconsistency, compromise, accommodation, adaptation, superadjacency, equivalence, multiple focus, juxtaposition, or good and bad space.” (Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 2nd edition, 128) 299

Learning from Las Vegas noted, the urban conditions of the two buildings are distinct: while Crawford Manor occupies a corner site in New Haven, CT,340 Guild House stands in a midback site on Spring Street Philadelphia, PA.341 Although the urban fabric is somewhat similar (both locations are in low density, mixed use areas, with various buildings heights), these two distinct conditions call for different approaches. Both projects, in fact, pay attention to these two urban situations, one (Crawford Manor) addressing the two streets, the other (Guild House) by proposing a building that has a primary street elevation.

Second, unlike what is claimed in their comparison, the two buildings are also different in size: Crawford Manor is a fourteen-story mid-rise building with a total of over a hundred and ten apartments, but the Guild House has six stories and about ninety apartments.

Third, if we were to follow the authors’ argument that their emphasis is on the “contrast in the images of these buildings in relation to their systems of construction,” then there are still several inconsistencies. Apparently, what we see are two facades, one “heroic and original,” the other “ugly and ordinary.” But how do the images communicate these ideas? To support the argument, the two buildings are shown in very different circumstances. Crawford Manor is photographed during a sunny day when the balconies and the protruding volumes cast strong shadows, thus emphasizing its “heroic” architecture. In contrast, the Guild House is deliberately showed under an overcast sky with almost no shadows on the façade.

The lack of shadows is specific to noontime. Considered one of the seven capital sins, accidie, boredom’s ancestor from the Middle Ages, was also known as the demon meridianus who visited the monk at noon and slowly induced him a state of languor and torpor. The middle of the day is a time when the shadow-less, two-dimensional world stands still. When the world becomes boring or is perceived as such, it requires action and engagement. Boredom is a universal matter of concern. In Eastern philosophy, boredom reflects a particular relation between knowledge and creation:

The men of knowledge are forever joyful, but others remain in the shadows of bewilderment, wandering astray in this world and the next. Were it not for the renewal of

340 At North Frontage Road and Park Street, New Haven, CT. 341 Between N 7th St. and N Perth St., Philadelphia, PA. 300

creation at each instant, boredom would overcome the entities, since Nature requires boredom. … So the boredom of the cosmos is identical with the boredom of the Real.342

Boredom surfaces as an individual and / or collective state of mind in moments of transition: at the turn of the twentieth century with the advent of the avant-gardes or in the 1950s – 1960s when modernism is called into question. As it simultaneously prefigures, and facilitates change, in architecture, art or politics, the state of boredom seems to operate as a hinge between two conditions. Venturi himself anchors his design beliefs in the architecture of Italian Mannerism and Rococo, historically known as transition moments from the high Renaissance to Baroque, and, respectively, from Baroque to Neoclassicism.343 The Guild House is photographed at a moment of the day with no shadows, and no depths, when its tediousness is deliberately emphasized, and boredom thus appears as a condition of the surface.

The two photographs of Crawford Manor and Guild House are substantially different on yet other levels (Figure 3.18). Although they are presented simply as two façades, the former is cropped so that we don’t see the building touching the ground. There is also little, if any sky at all present in the image, which makes the building appear suspended above ground. It is floating heroically and overcoming gravity. There is no sign of human inhabitation of the Crawford Manor, and, consequently, no scale. The Guild House, on the other hand, is more mundane. We see the street, a banal fence, and a cloudy sky. An indistinguishable figure stands in front of the entry wall thus giving us a sense of scale. One of the following pages shows a window detail where flowers grow in vases on the window sill, a sign that there are people living inside.

As we are asked to examine the two buildings even closer, in the following pages the images remain parallel, yet quite different in nature. While they both show details of the façades, their respective vantage points are not similar. Rudolph’s building is shown from a worm’s eye view, a technique made famous in architectural representation with Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika – the visual travelogue that he published after his 1924 trip to the United States, in which the worm’s eye view reinforced the sense of overwhelming power of American skyscrapers.344 This view of Crawford Manor is dramatic, we are crushed under the presence of an overpowering

342 Ibn al-Arabi quoted in William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 105-106. 343 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edition, 13. 344 Erich Mendelsohn, Amerika (New York: Dover, 1993). 301

building which thus appears, indeed, “heroic.” A strong contrast between lit and shaded surfaces contributes to this carefully orchestrated drama. Venturi’s building, on the other hand, is shown as a flattened representation; what is a photograph of the façade looks like a two-dimensional drawing without depth or thickness. In short, through all these different strategies, Crawford Manor (and by extension the duck) is made to appear interesting, and the Guild House (or the decorated shed), boring.

But are the two buildings as different as their images show them to be? Mocking the modern architectural jargon (articulation, flowing interior space, structural purity, floating cantilevered balconies345), the authors make the argument that despite its ordinary construction system and materials, Crawford Manor projects a heroic image. However, upon examining the plan, the interiors are not flowing spaces but rather conventional apartments that are also shown on the outside as fairly conventional. Taken at a different time and from different angles, the photographs of Crawford Manor would appear less heroic and much more ordinary. The “heroic and original” derive less from the expression of the structure and materiality, and more from the size of the building, which, as we have shown, is fairly large. Crawford Manor does not appear more technologically advanced, it simply makes use – just as the Guild House does – of the available technologies and materials of the time. Here’s how Rudolph has described the building: “The utilization of a special precast block for all exterior surfaces breaks down the scale of the building, enables it to weather well and helps to keep the building within the stringent economic limits imposed on public housing in the United States.”346

The authors’ claim that “Guild House has ornament on it; Crawford Manor does not. The ornament on Guild House is explicit.”347 They bring as evidence “the continuous stripe of white- glazed brick high on the façade, in combination with the plane of the white-glazed brick below.”348 However, following the same logic, once could argue that the concrete bands marking the balconies and windows of Crawford Manor also act as a form of explicit ornament, just as precast blocks used for finishing the exterior surfaces.

345 Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 2nd edition, 91. 346 Paul Rudolph in Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl, The Architecture of Paul Rudolph (New York: Praeger, 1970), 192. 347 Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 2nd edition, 91. 348 Ibid., 92. 302

The idea that Crawford Manor operates through connotative associations, whereas Guild House operates through denotative ones349 is also questionable. Guild House’s symmetrical television antenna “which is both an imitation of an abstract Lippold sculpture and symbol for the elderly” requires one’s ability to read connotative meanings. The vertical division of the building into levels of various heights that suggest “the proportions of a Renaissance palace” also requires implicit, rather than explicit associations.350

Summarizing the main features of the two buildings, the chapter concludes with the rhetorical question “Is Boring Architecture Interesting?” This question is deployed through the first of the two comparative tables in the book and synthesizes the essential differences between the duck and the decorated shed.351 (Figure 3.19.)

For all its commonness, is Guild House boring? For all its dramatic balconies, is Crawford Manor interesting? Is it not, perhaps, the other way around? Our criticism of Crawford Manor and the buildings it stands for is not moralistic, nor is it concerned with the so-called honesty in architecture or lack of correspondence between substance and image per se; Crawford Manor is ugly and ordinary while looking heroic and original.352

The duck and the decorated shed are defined earlier in the chapter when the main focus of the inquiry is stated to be “image over process or form.”353 The premise of this position is that “[a]rchitecture depends in its perception and creation on past experience and emotional association and that these symbolic and representational elements may often be contradictory to the form, structure, and program with which they combine in the same building.”354 The two resulting definitions are:

1.Where the architectural systems of space, structure, and program are submerged and distorted by an overall symbolic form. This kind of building-becoming-sculpture we call the duck in honor of the duck-shaped drive-in, “The Long Island Duckling,” illustrated in God’s Own Junkyard by Peter Blake.

349 Ibid., 92-93, 100-101. 350 Ibid., 92. 351 While the first table compares two buildings, the second one compares two urban conditions: the urban sprawl and the megastructure. (Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 2nd edition, 118). 352 Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 2nd edition, 101. 353 Ibid., 87. 354 Ibid., 87. 303

2.Where systems of space and structure are directly at the service of program, and ornament is applied independently of them. This we call the decorated shed.355

Acknowledging that architecture relies on experience and emotions draws from the nineteenth century aesthetic sources that have already been discussed. From this perspective, there is no difference between the duck (a symbolic form) and the decorated shed (a form with applied symbols) as both of them ultimately operate at the level of form and symbol, which are recognizable and recognized by the viewer. However, the main claim is that while both architectures are valid, the duck – largely illustrated by Modern precedents and specifically by Crawford Manor – is no longer relevant for the contemporary world.356

As developed as the comparison between the duck and the decorated shed is, the question of why something is relevant or not in the contemporary context is hardly answered. The two columns of the table include elements used both explicitly (meaning – expression, denotative – connotative, representational art – abstract expressionism, symbolic – expressive) and ironically (ordinary – extraordinary, inconsistent – consistent, conventional – advance, looks cheap – looks expensive).357 The last row sums up the analysis: Guild House is “boring” and Crawford Manor is “interesting.”358

The quotation marks, along with the rhetorical question at the beginning of the section, indicate that the judgment is ironic and self-deprecating. What the authors obviously mean is that things are the other way around, that the decorated shed / Guild House is interesting and the duck / Crawford Manor is boring.

Although boring and interesting are employed as a pair of opposites, we have seen that the two operate in a Janusian manner, where they represent two sides of the same condition and one quickly turns into the other. The attempt to emphasize the conceptual rift between the duck and the decorated shed through the “dichotomy” boring – interesting ultimately highlights the affinities, rather than the differences between the two concepts. The duck and the decorated shed are both self-referential and the claim that the latter is more engaged with (or relevant to) the

355 Ibid., 87. 356 Ibid., 87. 357 Ibid., 102. 358 Ibid., 102. 304

world than the former does not hold. Constantly seeking the interesting, Kierkegaard’s aesthete was an autonomous individual, operating outside networks of relationships and never bound by feelings or emotions. The interesting decorated shed is, likewise, an autonomous object without a context. Within the framework set up in this chapter, the boring and the interesting become normative and any possible associations with moods, feelings, or emotions are lost. If the implicit assumption in Adolf Göller’s theory on stylistic changes was that individuals are form- experiencing creatures with no agency, Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour similarly suggest – though claiming the opposite – that people have little or no agency in the experience or interpretation of architecture. Either a duck or a decorated shed, architecture is reduced to a formal symbolism that its users (not inhabitants) merely occupy. The most they can do is to recognize a sign. The interesting as norm encourages the autonomous search for change and the next new thing.

Qualified as boring, any form of modern architecture is quickly dismissed for being “too architectural,” too controlling, and irrelevant for today’s problems.359

The occasionally witty exercises in Pop imagery of the megastructure visionaries are fine as an end in themselves, more literary than architectural in intent. They are a bore as architectural theory and ultimately, as well as immediately, unresponsive to the real and interesting problems now.360

Foreseeing the digital shift as probably the most relevant change of the twentieth century, the authors identify the electronic revolution as one of the “real and interesting problems now.” They illustrate their position through another boring – interesting comparison:

For us the most boring pavilions at Expo ’67 were those that corresponded to the progressive structures of nineteenth-century world’s fairs celebrated by Sigfried Giedion; while the Czech Pavilion – an architectural and structural nonentity, but tattooed with symbols and moving pictures – was by far the most interesting. It also had the longest

359 Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 2nd edition,, 149. 360 Ibid., 149. 305

lines of spectators; the show, not the building, drew the crowd. The Czech Pavilion was almost a decorated shed.361

Directing their criticism against the technological experiments with megastructures from the 1960s, and Buckminster Fuller, the designer of the USA Pavilion at Expo ’67. (Ironically, they forget that an earlier instance of joining film / image and architecture had happened, in fact, within a structure designed by Fuller for the Moscow World’s Fair in 1959. Within Fuller’s geodesic dome, seven parallel floating screens were showing Glimpses of the USA, the propaganda film designed by Charles and Ray Eames in collaboration with other designers, architects, and artists.)

A big success at Expo ’67, the Czech Pavilion housed the display of the world’s first interactive film: a black comedy, Kinoautomat: One Man and His House, it requested the intervention of the audience at several points during the movie when the public was asked to choose between two scenes. However, regardless of the choices made, the end result was always the same: the burning building. The film was interpreted as a socialist critique of the capitalist world where the much celebrated freedom of choice is only apparent, because regardless of the choice, the final result will always be the same. Presented as interesting, the film and the pavilion are yet another example of self-referential, autonomous structures that exist independently of networks or relationships.

Epilogue on the boring and the interesting. These two terms continued to be present, though less articulated and with less force, in the subsequent work of Venturi and Scott Brown.

In 1996, Venturi published Iconography and Electronics Upon a Generic Architecture: A View from the Drafting Room, a collection of short essays and quips some of which were published for the first time.362 Written in an alert, witty, and often ironic tone, the essays bring together Venturi’s principles mostly in forms of aphorisms and maxims. While the content is not particularly original or different from earlier writings, the writing style has shifted from the

361 Ibid., 151. 362 Robert Venturi, Iconography and Electronics Upon a Generic Architecture: A View from the Drafting Room (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996). 306

didactic tone in Complexity and Contradiction and even Learning from Las Vegas, to a sharper, often angry voice. The first essay (titled “Sweet and Sour,” but explained through a lengthy subtitle) appears to revisit Venturi’s “gentle manifesto” from Complexity and Contradiction. There is, however, nothing gentle about this other manifesto, nor does it recall the intensely personal and subjective voice of Complexity and Contradiction. The boring finds its place again, this time as an attribute of abstraction, understood in opposition with signs, symbols, and iconology:

A gentle manifesto that acknowledges the demise of a universal architecture defined as expressive space and industrial structure:

Let us acknowledge architecture for now that is not ideologically correct, rhetorically heroic, theoretically pretentious, boringly abstract, technologically obsolete.363

The closing paragraph returns to the mood of boredom as a critique of the contemporary state of architecture: “Oh, to be bored in our Neo-Modern age of Minimalist hype!”364 Having lost its critical edge, the voice has turned contemptuous.

The first essay is followed by “A Not So Gentle Manifesto” (written in 1994) that reiterates the beliefs and principles that have been developed over the years. Each aphorism is structured as a dichotomy and ultimately illustrates a “good” and a “bad” architecture:

A not so gentle manifesto

…

Oh, for an architecture:

…

Whose aesthetic pixels define a medium for architecture – rather than whose wire frame rotations promote ennui,

…

363 Venturi, Iconography and Electronics, 3. 364 Ibid., 8. 307

Whose agonized complexity comes naturally – rather than willful picturesqueness bores in the end,

…

Aren’t’ we tired of our subjection to boring esoterica promoting arconcepture [sic] involving cuckoo sculptural form defined by old-fashioned shadow and archaic engineering which is really decoration?365

The book concludes with a series of aphorisms (“Mals Mots”) written from 1990 through 1995, where the theme of the boring reflects a profound and bitter discontent: “Journalist-critics – shrill and boring.” “From late Modernist dull dry to Neo-Modernist dull hype.” “Consistent dissonance creates not a difficult whole but a boring mess.” “Dissonance deriving from authentic contradiction – rather than boring rhetoric.”366

The last book published by Venturi and Scott Brown was Architecture as Signs and Systems: For a Mannerist Time, where the two clearly separated the authorship of the essays.367 In the fourth chapter (“A New Mannerism, for Architecture as Sign”), Venturi puts forward two ideas. On the one hand, he attempts to show the consistency of his positions over time by tracing the genealogy of his main ideas back to Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. On the other hand, he is trying to show the enduring validity of his concepts that are as powerful and relevant at the beginning of the twenty-first century as they were in the middle of the twentieth.368 In his alphabetical listing of the elements of a mannerist architecture we find what is probably one of the last explicit references to tedium and ennui:

Accommodation

Ambiguity

Boredom

365 Venturi, Iconography and Electronics, 11-15. 366 Ibid., 299-312. 367 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Architecture as Signs and Systems: For a Mannerist Time (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 2004). 368 “And can it now be said that an aesthetic evolution makes sense at the beginning of the twenty-first century, engaging a mannerist architecture evolved from the preceding style, that of classic Modernism – just as an aesthetic evolution made sense in the mid-sixteenth century engaging a mannerist architecture evolved from the preceding style, that of High Renaissance?” (Venturi and Scott Brown, Architecture as Signs and Systems, 73). 308

…

Monotony

…

Wrestling369

Conclusions.

To describe architecture in terms of boring and interesting is more than a mere rhetorical trope. Although employed loosely in everyday parlance, the concept of the interesting has a genealogy rooted in eighteenth and nineteenth century aesthetic theories, which indicates an emphasis on novelty, excess, curiosity, distraction, along with a lack of a firm and committed world view. Etymologically related with, though different from the concept of interest, the interesting had a distinct path in the visual arts of the 1960s where it bridged the gap between aesthetic and critical judgments. The interesting, some critics maintain, requires further discussions about the objects described as such and invites the various interlocutors to further elaborate their arguments. Other critics propose that far from being a critical term, the interesting offers nothing more than a shallow aesthetic and disengaged description. In this context, I propose that Venturi’s theoretical stance, though influenced by midcentury artistic movements and specifically Pop Art, is built upon the nineteenth century aesthetic discourse on vitality and form.

Looking at Venturi’s early work from Complexity and Contradiction and at his collaboration with Scott Brown in Learning from Las Vegas, I suggest that the category of the interesting in architecture has specific features that distinguish it from parallel discourses in visual arts. Its use is neither innocent, nor neutral. Through a particular focus on appearance and formal compositions, it shows a shift toward architecture as an autonomous object. Formal arrangements of separate elements such as windows, columns, decorative elements, signs, and

369 Ibid., 75-77. The other elements are: Both-and, Breaks, Chaos, Complexity, Contradiction, Contrast, Convention Broken, Deviations, Difficult whole, Discontinuity, Disorder, Dissonance, Distortion, Diversity, Dualities, Dumbness, Eclectic, Everyday, Exceptions, Generic broken, Imbalance, Inconsistency, Incorrect, Inflection, Irony, Jumps in scale, Juxtapositions, Layering, Meaning, Naïveté, Obscurity, Ordinary, Paradox, Pluralism, Pop, Pragmatism, Reality, Scales (plural), Sophistication, Syncopation, Tension, Terribilità, Wit. 309

symbols result in self-referential and normative practices. Lastly, complexity is expressed as a preference for excess of combinatory devices, historical references and different types of signs.

The boring and the interesting have implications that go beyond the vague and the elusive meanings we generally attribute them. Understanding their intellectual genealogy and consequences for architectural discourse is particularly relevant today at a time where virtually anything has the potential to be built and made present. In a world full of possibilities, the question of relevance raised by Venturi and Scott Brown decades ago remains critical, but the answers are certainly different. Examining contemporary categories such as the boring and the interesting, helps defining our criteria for constructing a meaningful worldview, as well as our choices and the way we legitimize them.

310

Chapter 3. Figures.

Figure 3.1. Jasper John, Three Flags, 1958. Public domain.

Figure 3.2. Robert Morris, Untitled (Brown Felt), 1973. Public domain.

Figure 3.3. Claes Oldenburg, Work from The Store, 1961. Public domain. 311

Figure 3.4. Robert Venturi, Pearson House, 1957, from Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed., 1972, p.106.

Figure 3.5. Venturi, Cope and Lippincott, Renovation of the J. B. Duke House (1957), from Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed., 1972, p.107.

Figure 3.6. Venturi and Short, North Penn Visiting Nurse Association, 1960. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. 312

Figure 3.7. Venturi and Rauch, Cope and Lippincott, Guild House, 1963-1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 3.8. Venturi and Rauch, Vanna Venturi House, 1962, Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 3.9. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, National Football Hall of Fame, 1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. 313

Figure 3.10. Nicholas Hawksmoor, St. George Church, Bloomsbury, London. Public domain.

Figure 3.11. Ste. Madeleine, Vezelay, from Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed., 1972, p. 46.

Figure. 3.12. Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, from Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed., 1972, p. 20.

Figure. 3.13. Louis Kahn, Goldenberg House, from Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed., 1972, p. 51. 314

Figure 3.14. Venturi and Short, North Penn Visiting Nurse Association, elevation studies, 1960. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

315

Figure 3.15. Venturi and Rauch, Three buildings for a town in Ohio, 1965. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 3.16. Venturi and Rauch, Gerod Clark and Arthur Jones, Copley Square Competition Entry, 1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Figure 3.17. Venturi and Rauch, Gerod Clark and Arthur Jones, Copley Square Competition Entry, 1966. Venturi and Scott Brown Collection. Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

316

Figure 3.18. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Comparison between Paul Rudolph’s Crawford Manor and Robert Venturi’s Guild House, from Learning from Las Vegas, 2nd ed., 1977.

Figure 3.19. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Comparison between Paul Rudolph’s Crawford Manor and Robert Venturi’s Guild House, from Learning from Las Vegas, 2nd ed., 1977.

317

Postface

“A Quietly Seen Unseen”

Robert Venturi’s contribution to architectural theory and practice is unquestionable. The polemics surrounding his work continue to be relevant today, over sixty years after the publication of his first treatise, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, as questions about meaning and relevance in architecture are more valid today than ever before. Often dismissed as a rhetorical pun on Mies van der Rohe’s modernist adage Less is more, Venturi’s Less is a bore never received scholarly attention. Upon closer examination, however, questions about boredom, boring, and interesting surface repeatedly in his treatise and show a consistent concern with the tedium of modern world. Venturi was not the only architect who acknowledged boredom as a relevant concern. Adolf Göller, Le Corbusier, Josef Frank, Bernard Rudofsky, Cedric Price, Serge Chermayeff, Christopher Alexander, and Sigfried Giedion among others all share the same unease in front of this pervasive illness of the modern world. Minimal and conceptual artists such as Ed Ruscha, Donald Judd, and Agnes Martin deliberately sought boredom as a mode of eliciting emotion by distancing the viewer from the work. Unlike most of his peers, Venturi shows a consistent interest in this topic and attempts to go beyond its appeal as a rhetorical trope. Less is a bore synthesizes, if unknowingly, the ethos and mood of the age.

The general argument of this dissertation is that, while Venturi recognizes the pervasive presence of boredom in the life of modern individuals, he fails to acknowledge the potential of this mood as a generative, not only critical tool. While some of his early work engages promising ideas about embodied practices, his attempt to instrumentalize boredom as a formalist construct manifested through shapes and forms, eventually leads to an architecture of disembodied signs and symbols.

Facing Venturi in a dialogue rather than confronting him in a polemics, Steinberg offers an alternative position. Experiencing boredom first hand, instead of fighting tedium, he delves into it. For him, boredom, contemplation, dor, daydreaming fold into each other and act as catalysts of imagination.

318

The dissertation looked at Venturi’s relationship with boredom and the boring through three lenses: habitus, flatness, and the interesting. Together, they provide a multifold approach not only to the presence of boredom in Venturi’s work, but also to the presence of boredom in the larger architectural discourse. Firstly, habitus, the embodied practice defined by Bourdieu, mediates between the tedium of daily routines and the comforting values of the everyday. It is when habitus loses its bodily dimension that it becomes boring. Secondly, Venturi’s positivist attempt to make explicit and flatten every meaning of his work parallels his interest in the use of flat surfaces. Paradoxically, instead of providing answers, this position results in opening more questions, showing that ultimately the reading of every work is never a thin, but always a thick description. Lastly, by examining the dichotomy boring – interesting the study uncovers the specificity and consequences of this polemics for architectural discourse. Rather than opposite terms, the boring and the interesting (like the duck and the decorated shed) sit in a Janusian relationship with each other and indicate an unsettling disenchantment with the world. The dissertation suggests that it is through imagination rather than novelty that one has access to the wonders of the world, often hidden in plain sight under the plain garb of the everyday.

Reading Steinberg’s drawings through the lens of boredom offers precisely the exercise in imagination necessary to turn tedium into contemplation. Anchored in the embodied practices of habitus, his work provides endless modes of folding boredom into a reflective mood. In doing so, it recovers the values of the infra-ordinary and constructs worlds situated at the intersection of the real and the imaginary.

Is there a place for boredom in today’s world?

The polemics between Less is more and Less is a bore does not end with Venturi. In 2010, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels publishes Yes Is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution, an architectural manifesto – monograph of the Bjarke Ingles Group office.1 Situating himself in the genealogy of Mies van der Rohe, Robert Venturi, Philip Johnson, Rem Koolhaas, and Barack Obama, Ingels uses the language of comic books to convey ideas that are neither particularly creative, not particularly engaging. Largely dismissing ideas that are not his as

1 Bjarke Ingels, Yes Is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution (Köln: Taschen, 2010). 319

boring, Ingels implicitly embarks on a search for the interesting. Using the visual equivalents of brief tweets and text messages, he develops modes of representation that reduce architectural concepts and developments to one-dimensional formal diagrams.

Describing “The Mountain,” one of the most celebrated projects of the firm, Ingels positions his idea as the antithesis of “a standard apartment slab next to a boring parking block.”2 (Figure 4.1) In the “Infinity Loop” project, he changes the location of the rowhouses and apartments “from the boring Northeast to the sunny Southwest.”3 (Figure 4.2.) In “Urban Typography,” the outcome of challenging the “depressingly boring” tower typology is the manipulation of exterior shapes into an oversized alphabet.4 (Figure 4.3.) The result (“a giant town sign”5) is not fundamentally different from Venturi’s proposition for a bill-ding-board. Reinforcing similar ideas about two-dimensional urban signs, a hotel at the periphery stands out through its shape (triangular, rather than rectangular plan) and façade treatment (that suggests the profiles of three Danish royal figures.)6 (Figure 4.4.) From certain angles, the building appears two-dimensional – indeed, a decorated shed. Seeing this project as the meeting point between Peter Zumthor and Andy Warhol, Ingels, however, claims to have added a third category to Venturi’s duck vs. decorated shed, which he calls the princess: “functional elements that independently seem benign constitute a collective iconic expression of another magnitude.”7 Missing the point of the close kinship between the boring and the interesting, the duck and the decorated shed, Ingels perpetuates the endless loop of the formal boredom he is trying so hard to overcome.

Despite the contemporary bias for formal explorations facilitated by technologies such as CNC machines and 3D-printing, memorable architectural experiences emerge from the slow- paced mood of ennui turned into contemplation. Although never conceptualized through the lens of boredom, the work of the Spanish architect Alberto Campo Baeza seems a stubborn exploration of white boxes. In its extreme asceticism and formal modesty lies the exuberance of material and spatial experiences. Every project is a carefully constructed narrative that joins

2 Ibid., 79. 3 Ibid., 96. 4 Ingels, Yes Is More, 195. 5 Ibid., 195. 6 Ibid., 340. 7 Ibid., 341-343. 320

inhabitants, landscape, and materials through the body of the house. The photographic essays that accompany each project systematically include a silhouette of a woman that comes into or walks outside the frame (Figure 4.5.). Techniques of visual storytelling articulate the embodied experience of the house.

For a couple of years starting in 2006, Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa and British designer Jasper Morrison have curated several shows under the title Super Normal.8 Displayed on neutral white boxes, the objects exhibited came from different generations and times but shared the same quality: unsensational objects of the everyday, from paper clips and wastebaskets to grills and bicycles (Figure 4.6.). Commenting on our contemporary assumption that “normal” has become the equivalent of “unstimulating” or “boring,” the designers make an argument for ordinary objects that perform just as they should: naturally. Two intertwined ideas are at work in their approach: on the one hand, the absence of style and originality lends these objects the capacity to become invisible. On the other hand, by making them so normal, they become extraordinary. The implicit statement is a critique of the interesting, of seductive things that attract attention, that are superficial, spectacular, loud, and, ultimately, arbitrary. There is a clear de-emphasis of form and shape in favor of materiality and details. The authorship of the objects selected varies: some of them are completely anonymous, others come with the label of a designer name, but they all share the quality of being “a quietly seen unseen.” Beauty, as Fukasawa and Morrison see it, does not belong to forms or shapes, but rather qualifies the relationship between people, objects, and circumstances.

British architect John Pawson operates within the thick space where boredom folds into meditation. Usually described as “minimalist,” his architecture recovers the simple and unassuming qualities of mundane forms and objects. His designs are built around the activities and events of their inhabitants. From monastic life to food making, his work embraces the simple and elegant joys of the everyday (Figure 4.7.). Not unlike Steinberg, who saw boredom at the core of his creative pursuits, Pawson confesses: “I do sometimes think: ‘What’s next after architecture?’ One’s always trying to make the work better, but I don’t know, maybe something

8 Published catalog: Naoto Fukasawa and Jasper Morrison, Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary (Baden: Lars, 2014). 321

different. I have a very low boredom threshold.”9 Having practiced as a professional photographer before he trained as an architect, Pawson continues to work with photography as a means of conveying moods and atmospheres (Figure 4.8.).

I like the everyday. I rarely photograph the spectacular view. Capturing small moments makes me feel less anxious about missing things. I see so many things.10

9 “An Eye for Detail: Architect John Pawson’s Photographs,” The Guardian, accessed March 19, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/nov/19/an-eye-for-detail-architect-john-pawsons-photographs 10 Ibid. 322

Conclusions. Figures.

Figure 4.1. BIG, The Mountain, 2008. Public domain.

Figure 4.2. BIG, The Infinity Loop, 2010. Public domain.

Figure 4.3. BIG, Vejle Housing (Urban Typography), 2003. Public domain.

Figure 4.4. BIG, VMCP Hotel, 2011. Public domain. 323

Figure 4.5. Alberto Campo Baeza, Domus Aurea, 2015. Public domain.

Figure 4.6. Naoto Fukasawa and Jasper Morrison, Super Normal, 2006-2009. Public domain.

Figure 4.7. John Pawson, Okinawa House, 2013-2016. Public domain.

Figure 4.8. John Pawson, Spectrum, 2016. Public domain. 324

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY SOURCES

Saul Steinberg Papers. Beinecke Library, Yale University.

Venturi Scott Brown Collection. The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

SECONDARY SOURCES

N/A, Lessons from Bernard Rudofsky: life as a voyage. Edited by Architekturzentrum Wien in association with The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Exhibition Catalog. March 6-May 28, 2007, Architekturzentrum Wien; July 3-Sept. 30, 2007, Canadian Centre for Architecture; March 11-June 8, 2008, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

Adorno, Theodor. “Free Time.” The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Translated by Ronald L. Martinez. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Agamben, Giorgio. The Man Without Content. Translated by Georgia Albert. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.

Agnew, Hugh E. Outdoor Advertising. New York: Garland, 1985.

Alexander, Christopher and Serge Chermayeff. Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanism. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1963.

Alexander, Christopher. Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964.

325

Allen, Deborah. “Parlor of a Satirist.” Interiors Issue 110 (1950): 110-113.

Almond, Steve. “My Kids Are Obsessed with Technology and It’s All My Fault.” The New York Times, June 21, 2013.

Amin, Ash and Nigel Thrift. Cities: Reimagining the Urban. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2002.

Anderson, Ben, “Time-Stilled Space-Slowed: How Boredom Matters,” Geoforum 35 (2004): 739-754.

Antin, Eleanor. “Reading Ruscha.” Art in America Vol. 61 Issue 6 (Nov.-Dec. 1973): 64-71.

Architectural Monographs no.21: Venturi Scott Brown and Associates – On Houses and Housing .London: Academy Editions, 1992.

Ashbery, John. “Saul Steinberg: Callibiography.” Artnews Annual Issue 36 (1970): 52-59.

Ashbery, John. “Saul Steinberg: The Stamp of a Genius.” Artnews No. 68 (Novvember 1969).

Bachelard, Gaston. Dialectic of Duration. Translated by Mary McAllester Jones. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

Badoux, Vincent. “Saul Steinberg: Le dessin revisité.” Les Cahiers du Musée de la bande dessinée Issue 10 (April, 2004): 32-39.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: the University of Michigan Press, 1984 [1981].

Bellow, Saul. “Literature and Culture: An Interview with Saul Bellow.” Salmagundi. Nr. 30. Summer 1975: 6-23.

Bellow, Saul. “On boredom.” New York Review of Books. (Aug. 7, 1975): 22.

326

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schoken Books, 1968.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.

Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Berenson, Bernhard. In conversation with Umberto Mora. Conversations with Berenson. Translated by Florence Hammond. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1965.

Berlin, Isaiah. The Fox and the Hedgehog: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1953.

Berlin, Isaiah. The Hedgehog and the Fox. An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954.

Bernstein, David. Advertising Outdoors: Watch This Space! London: Phaidon Press, 2006.

Berryman, John. 77 Dream Songs. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964.

Best, Steven and Kellner, Douglas. The Postmodern Turn. New York: Guilford Press, 1998.

Blake, Peter. “Saul Steinberg: Critic without Words.” Architecture Issue 88 (1999): 106-109.

Blake, Peter. God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964.

Bloch, Ernst. “Imminent Boredom.” In Traces. Translated by Anthony A. Nassar. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2006.

Boorstin, Daniel. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Vintage Books, 2012 [1963].

Boring, Edward G. A History of Experimental Psychology. 2nd edition. New York: Appleton- Century-Crofts, 1957.

Boss, Matthew. “Metaphysics and the Mood of Deep Boredom: Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Mood.” In Essays on Boredom and Modernity, edited by Barbara delle Pezze and Carlo Salzani. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1994.

327

Boulding, Elise. Friends Testimonies in the Home. Publication of the Religious Education Committee, Friends General Conference, 1953.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, U.K; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Brayshaw, A. Neave. The Quakers: Their Story and Message. 3rd edition. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1938.

Brinton, Howard H. Friends for 350 Years. 11th edition. Wallingford, Penn.: Pendle Hill Publications, 2002.

Brinton, Howard H. The Religious Philosophy of Quakerism. Wallingford, Penn.: Pendle Hill Publications, 1979.

Brodsky, Joseph. “In Praise of Boredom” in On Grief and Reason. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995.

Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947.

Brownlee, David. Out of Ordinary: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Associates. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001.

Burke, Kenneth. Permanence and Change, an Anatomy of Purpose. Los Altos, CA: Hermes Publications, 1954.

Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. New York: Vintage Books, 1957.

Burt, Nathaniel. “Philadelphia Plain and Fancy.” Horizon Vol. V Issue 6 (1963): 4-15.

Buzzi, Aldo. “L’Architetto Steinberg.” Domus 214 (October 1946).

328

Buzzi, Aldo; Steinberg, Saul. Reflections and Shadows. Translated by John Shepley. New York: Random House, 2002.

Cage, John. Silence: Lecture and Writings. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1961.

Cage, John; Foreoman, Richard; Kostelanetz, Richard. “Art in the Culture.” Performing Arts Journal Vol. 4 No. ½ (May, 1979): 70-84.

Caillois, Roger. Man, Play and Games. Translated by Meyer Barash. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1961.

Calvino, Italo. Marcovaldo or the Seasons in the City. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1983.

Cameron, Ian. “Michelangelo Antonioni.” Film Quarterly Vol. 16. No 1 (Autumn, 1962): 1-58.

Carrier, David. “Saul Steinberg Merlin James.” ArtUS (May-June, 2007).

Casey, Edward S. Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Casey, Edward S. Representing Place: Landscape Paintings and Maps. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Charlier, Philippe; J. Poupon; I. Huynh-Charlier; J-F Saliege; D. Favier; C. Keyser; B. Ludes. “Fatal Alchemy.” BMJ: British Medical Journal, Vol. 339, No. 7735 (19-26 December 2009).

Chittick, William C. The Sufi Path of Knowledge. New York: State University of New York Press.

Ciocan, Cristian. “Heidegger and the Problem of Boredom” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 41, No. 1, (January 2010), pp. 64-77.

Cioran, Emil. Drawn and Quartered. Translated from the French by ?? New York: Seaver Books, 1983.

329

Clive, Geoffrey. “A Phenomenology of Boredom.” Journal of Existentialism Vol. 5 No. 20 (1965): 359-370.

Cohen, Jean-Louis. Le Corbusier Le Grand. Paris: Phaidon, 2014.

Colomina, Beatriz. “Enclosed by Images: The Eamses’ Multimedia Architecture,” Grey Room No. 2 (Winter, 2001), pp. 5-29.

Colpitt, Frances. “The Issue of Boredom: Is It Interesting?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, No.4 (Summer 1985): 359-365.

Colquhoun, Alan. “Typology and Design Method.” Perspecta 12 (1969): 71-74.

Conrad, Peter. “It’s Boring: Notes in the Meanings of Boredom in Everyday Life.” Qualitative Sociology 20, No. 4 (1997): 465-475.

Crang, Mike; Thrift, Nigel. Thinking Space. London: Routledge, 2000.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Beyond Boredom and Anxiety. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1975.

Dalle Pezze, Barbara and Carlo Salzani, eds. Essays on Boredom and Modernity. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009.

Dandelion, Pink. Quakers: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Danto, Arthur. “Introduction.” In Saul Steinberg: The Discovery of America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground. Trans. by Hugh Aplin. London: Hesperus Classics, 2006 [1864].

Edwards, A.Trystan. Architectural Style. London: Faber and Gwyer.

Elkins, James. “Camera Dolorosa.” History of Photography 1 (2007): 22-30.

330

Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. New York: New Directions, 1947.

Epstein, Mikhail; Klyukanov, Igor. “The Interesting.” Qui Parle Vol. 18 No. 1 (Fall/Winter, 2009): 75-88.

Fager, Charles E. “The Quaker Testimony of Simplicity.” The Quaker Religious Thought Vol. 14 No. 1 (Summer, 1972): 2-30.

Fausch, Deborah. The Context of Meaning is Everyday Life: Venturi and Scott Brown’s Theories of Architecture and Urbanism. Ph.D. Dissertation. Princeton University, 1999.

Fedders, Kristin U. “Quakers and the Arts, ‘Plain and Fancy:’ An Anglo-American Perspective by David Sox.” Quaker History Vol. 91 No. 1 (Spring, 2002): 70.

Fenichel, Otto. The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel. New York, W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1953.

Finkelpearl, Philip J. “Contemporary Confrontations,” JSAH 38, No. 2 (May 1979): 203-205.

Flatly, Johnathan. “Allegories of Boredom.” In A Minimal Future: Art as Object 1958-1968, edited by Ann Goldstein. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2004.

Foster, Hal. “Death in America.” October Vol. 75 (Winter, 1996): 36-59.

Foster, Hal. The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Frampton, Kenneth. “America 1960-1970: Note on an Urban Imagery and Theory.” Casabella No. 359-360 (1971): 24-38.

Frank, Josef and Mikael Bergquist. Accidentism: Josef Frank. Basel: Birkhauser, 2016.

Frascari, Marco. “A Tradition of Architectural Figure: A Search for Vita Beata.”In Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relationship between Body and Architecture, edited by Robert Tavernor and George Dodds. Camdbridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2002.

Frascari, Marco. “Horizons at the Drafting Table.” Chora Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, (2007): 179-200.

331

Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” 1967.

Frost, J. William. “From Plainness to Simplicity: Changing Quaker Ideals for Material Culture.” In Lapsansky, Emma Jones; Verplanck, Anne A. (eds.). Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Frost, J. William. The Quaker Family in Colonial America: A Portrait of the Society of Friends. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973.

Fukasawa, Naoto and Jasper Morrison. Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary. Baden: Lars, 2014. Gans, Herbert J. “Planning and Social Life: Friendship and Neighbor Relations in Suburban Communities.” Journal of the American Institute of Planners Vol. XXVII No. 2 (May, 1961): 134-140.

Gans, Herbert J. “The Balanced Community: Homogeneity or Heterogeneity in Residential Areas?” Journal of the American Institute of Planners Vol. XXVII No. 3 (August, 1961): 176- 184.

Gans, Herbert J. “Toward a Human Architecture: A Sociologist’s View of the Profession.” JAE Vol. 31 No. 2 (Nov., 1977): 26-31.

Gardiner, Michael E. and Julian Jason Haladyn. Boredom Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2017.

Garfinkel, Susan Laura. Genres of Worldliness: Meanings of the Meeting House for Philadelphia Friends, 1755-1830. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Pennsylvania, 1997.

Garfinkel, Susan. “Letting in “the World: (Re)interpretive Tensions in the Quaker Meeting House.” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture Vol. 5 (1995): 78-92.

Garfinkel, Susan. “Quakers and High Chests: The Plainness Problem Reconsidered.” In Lapsansky, Emma Jones; Verplanck, Anne A. (eds.). Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. 332

Gasser, Manuel. “Steinberg as an Advertising Artist.” Graphis Vol. 12 Issue 67 (1956): 376-385.

Gebhard, David. “Saul Steinberg and Paul Klee.” Artforum Issue 1 (Feb., 1963): 17.

Geertz, Clifford. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” In The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz, 3-30. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Geiwitz, P. James. “Structure of Boredom.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Vol. 3 No. 5. (1966): 592-600.

Georges, Robert A. and Alan Dundes. “Toward a Structural Definition of the Riddle.” The Journal of American Folklore 76, No. 300 (April-June 1963): 111-118.

Giedion, Sigfrid. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Ginzburg, Carlo. “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know About It” Critical Inquiry 20, No.1 (Autumn 1993): 10-35.

Ginzburg, Carlo. “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and scientific Method,” History Workshop, No. 9 (Spring 1980): 5-36.

Girard, A.H.; Laurie, W.D. An Exhibition for Modern Living. Exhibition Catalog. Detroit: The Detroit Institute of Arts, 1945.

Glueck, Grace. “The Artist Speaks: Saul Steinberg.” Art in America Issue 58 (Nov. – Dec. 1970): 110-117.

Goldstein, Ann (ed.) A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968. Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004.

Goldstein, Ann (editor). A Minimal Future: Art as Object 1958-1968. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2004.

Göller, Adolf. “What Is the Cause of Perpetual Style Change in Architecture?” In Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics 1873-1893, edited by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomu. Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994. 333

Gombrich, E. H. “The wit of Saul Steinberg.” Art Journal Vol. 43 No. 4 (Winter, 1983): 377- 380.

Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Millennium Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Gombrich, E. H. Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art. 2nd ed. London: Phaidon, 1971.

Goodey, Brian. “Cut Down to Size? Christopher’s Alexander’s ‘A City Is Not a Tree’.” Built Environment 8, No.4 (1982).

Goodstein, Elizabeth S. Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Gopnik, Adam. “What Steinberg Saw: The Cartoonist and His America.” The New Yorker (Nov.13, 2000): 141-147.

Grooms, Red. “The world According to Steinberg.” The New York Times (Dec. 06, 1992).

Gudis, Catherine. Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Haladyn, Julian Jason. Boredom and Art: Passions of the Will to Boredom. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2015.

Harries, Karsten. “Thoughts on a Non-Arbitrary Architecture.” Perspecta Vol. 20 (1983): 9-20.

Harries, Karsten. Between Nihilism and Faith: A Commentary on Either/Or. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010.

Harries, Karsten. The Ethical Function of Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000) [1997].

Harries, Karsten. The Meaning of Modern Art: A Philosophical Interpretation. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991 [1968].

334

Healy, Sean Desmond. Boredom, Self and Culture. London: Associated University Presses, 1984.

Heckscher, August. The Public Happiness. New York: Atheneum, 1962.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1967.

Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Heidegger, Martin. What Is Called Thinking? New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1976.

Henderson, Sally and Robert Landau. Billboard Art. London: Angus & Robertson, 1981.

Herman, Bernard L. “Eighteenth-Century Quaker Houses in the Delaware Valley and the Aesthetics of Practice.” In Lapsansky, Emma Jones; Verplanck, Anne A. (eds.). Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Herman, Bernard L. “Introduction” to “Quakers as Producers.” In Lapsansky, Emma Jones; Verplanck, Anne A. (eds.). Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Hershberger, Robert G. “Architecture and Meaning.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 4, No. 4 (October 1970): 37-55.

Heuvel, Jean vanden. “Straight from the Hand and Mouth of Steinberg.” Life Vol. 59 Issue 24 (Dec. 10, 1965): 59-70.

Hickman, Miranda B.; McIntyre John. Rereading the New Criticism. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2012.

Higgot, Andrew; Wray, Timothy. Camera Constructs: Photography, Architecture, and the Modern City. London: Ashgate, 2012.

Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002. 335

Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.

Hockney, David. “Introduction: On Billboard, Art and Artists.” In Billboard Art, by Sally Henderson and Robert Landau. London: Angus & Robertson, 1981.

Hollander, John. “Introduction.” In Steinberg, Saul. The Passport. Revised Edition. New York: Random House, 1979.

Hollander, John. Steinberg at the Smithsonian. 1973

Hollander, John. Steinberg at the Smithsonian. Exhibition Catalog. Dec. 21, 1973 – Feb. 10, 1974.

Horgan, John. The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age. Reading, Mass.: Helix Books, 1996.

Hudnut, Joseph. “The Post-Modern House.” Architectural Record Vol. 97 (1945): 70-75.

Hughes, Robert . “The World of Steinberg” in Time, 4/17/1978 Vol. 111 issue 16.

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949.

Hull, Clark L. Essentials of Behavior. Yale University Press: New Haven, 1951.

Hunter, Sam. American Art of the 20th Century. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1973.

Husserl, Edmund. Experience and Judgment. Translated by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

Huxley, Aldous. On the Margin: Notes and Essays. London: Chatto & Windus, 1971.

Huxtable, Ada Louise. “Heroics Are Out, Ordinary Is In.” The New York Times (January 18, 1970): 27.

Hyman, Stanley Edgar. The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism. New York: Vintage Books, 1955.

Ingels, Bjarke. Yes Is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution. Köln: Taschen, 2010. 336

Ionesco, Eugene. “La tragédie du language.” Spectacles Issue 2 (July, 1958): 3-5.

Ionesco, Eugene. “Steinberg: Artiste.” Connaissance des Arts Issue 303 (May, 1977): 94-101.

Ionescu, Vlad. “Architectural Symbolism: Body and Space in Heinrich Wölfflin and Wilhelm Worringer.” Architectural Histories, 4(1), (2016): 1-9.

Jackson, J.B. Landscapes: Selected Writings of J.B. Jackson. The University of Massachusetts Press, 1970.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961.

Jacobs, Steven. “Leafing Through Los Angeles: Edward Ruscha’s Photographic Books.” In Higgot, Andrew; Wray, Timothy. Camera Constructs: Photography, Architecture, and the Modern City. London: Ashgate, 2012.

Jameson, Fredric. “The Politics of Utopia.” New Left Review. 25. Jan-Feb. 2004: 35-54.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or the Cultural logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.

Jancovich, Mark. The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism. Cambridge, UK; Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Jarzombek, Mark. “De-Scribing the Language of Looking: Wölfflin and the History of Aesthetic.” Assemblage No. 23 (April 1994): 28-69.

Jencks, Charles. “How Big Is Bad?” Architectural Review. Vol. 212. Nr. 1266. August 2002: 66- 69.

Johansen, John. “Act and Behavior in Architecture.” Perspecta 7 (1961): 43-50.

Johnson, Carolyn. “The Joy of Boredom.” Online Resource. http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/03/09/the_joy_of_boredom/ Accessed on ??

Johnson, Philip. “The Seven Crutches of Modern Architecture.” Perspecta 3 (1955): 40-45.

337

Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects” in Complete Writings 1959-1976: Gallery Reviews, Book Reviews, Articles, Letters to the Editor, Reports, Statements, Complaints. Nova Scotia New York: Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York University Press, 1976.

Jullien, Francois. In Praise of Blandness: Proceedings from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics. Trans. Paula M. Varsano. New York: Zone Books, 2004.

Kael, Pauline. “The Sick-Soul-of_Europe Parties: ‘La Notte,’ ‘La Dolce Vita,’ ‘Marienbad’.” The Massachusetts Review Vol. 4 No.2 (Winter, 1963): 378-391.

Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Translated by Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Kaprow, Allan. “On the Various Possibilities to Interpret and Utilize Boredom in Art and Life.” Domus. 605 (1980).

Keats, John. The Crack in the Picture Window. Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, 1956.

Kenny, Lesley. Boredom Escapes US: A Cultural Collage in Eleven Stories. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Toronto 2009.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/ Or. Translated by David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1959.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/ Or. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Kirk, Russell. “The Architecture of Servitude and Boredom.” Modern Age. Vol. 26. Nr. 2 (1982): 114-121.

Klapp, Orin. Overload and Boredom: Essays in the Quality of Life in the Information Society. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986.

Koch, Gertrud. “Rudolf Arnheim: The Materialist of Aesthetic Illusion: Gestalt Theory and Reviewer’s Practice.” New German Critique, No. 51 (Autumn 1990): 164-178. 338

Kolenda, Konstantin. “Banning Boredom.” Humanist. Vol. 45. Nr. 6 (Nov.-Dec. 1985): 37.

Köngäs Maranda, Elli. “Riddles and Riddling: An Introduction.” The Journal of American Folklore 89, No. 352 (June 1976): 127-137.

Kotz, Liz. Words to Be Looked At. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2007.

Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Kramer, Hilton. “An Art of Boredom?” The New York Times. June 5 (1966): D23.

Kuhn, Reinhard. The Demon of Noontide. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976.

Lacayo, Richard. “What Will Our Skyline Look Like?” Time. Vol. 155. Nr. 7 (Feb. 21, 2000): 80-82.

Langbauer, Laurie. Novels of Everyday Life: The Series in English Fiction, 1850-1930. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Lapsansky, Emma Jones. “Past Plainness to Present Simplicity: A Search for Quaker Identity.” In Lapsansky, Emma Jones; Verplanck, Anne A. (eds.). Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Lapsansky, Emma Jones; Verplanck, Anne A. (eds.). Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Laurence, Peter L. “Contradictions and Complexities: Jane Jacobs’s and Robert Venturi’s Complexity Theories.” Journal of Architectural Education 59, No. 3 (February 2006): 49-60.

Lavoie, Catherine C. “Quaker Beliefs and Practices and the Eighteenth-Century Development of the Friends Meeting House in the Delaware Valley.” In Lapsansky, Emma Jones; Verplanck, Anne A. (eds.). Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

339

Lavoie, Catherine C. “Reunified, Rebuilt, Enlarged, or Rehabilitated: Deciphering Friends’ Complex Attitudes toward Their Meeting Houses.” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum Vol. 19 No. 2 (Fall, 2012): 20-52.

Le Corbusier. Towards an Architecture. Getty Research Institute, 2007 [1925].

Le Monde. Mars 14-15, 1968.

Lebensztejn, Jean-Claude; Cooper, Kate. “Photorealism, Kitsch and Venturi.” SubStance Vol. 10 No. 2 Issue 31 (1981): 75-104.

Leeper, Robert. “The Relation between Gestalt Psychology and the Behavioristic Psychology of Learning.” Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science 34, No. 23-25 (1931): 268-273.

Leeuwen, Marco van. “The Digital Void: e-NNUI and experience.” Pezze and Salzani, Essays on Boredom and Modernity. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1994.

Lefebvre, Henri and Christine Levich. “The Everyday and Everydayness.” Yale French Studies No. 73 (1987): 7-11.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991.

Lefebvre, Henri. Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment. Translated by Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Legge, Elizabeth. “Boredom.” Public: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Culture, and Ideas. (Spring, 2000): 29-30.

Lepenies, Wolf. Melancholy and Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Lepetit, P. “L’Inspecteur Steinberg.” L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui Issue 172. (1974): XV.

Leroux, Jean-François. “Exhausting Ennui: Bellow, Dostoevsky, and the Literature of Boredom.” College Literature Vol. 35 No. 1 (Winter, 2008): 1-15.

Life Magazine. September 1. 1970.

Lind, Richard. “Why Isn’t Minimal Art Boring?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45. No. 2 (Winter 1986): 195-197.

340

Lippard, Lucy R. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. New York: Praeger, 1973.

Lippold, Richard. “Projects for Pan Am and Philharmonic.” Art in America 50, No. 2 (Summer 1962).

Lizard, Omar. The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. 34:4 (2004): 375-401.

Lizardo, Omar. “The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34, No. 4 (Dec. 2004): 375-401.

Lynes, Russell. “A Man Named Steinberg.” Harper’s Vol. 209 (August, 1954): 44-48.

Madden, Gregory J. “Editorial: An Anniversary and an Inaugural Issue.” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 99, No.1 (January 2013): 125-128.

Maistre, Xavier de. A Journey around My Room. Translated by Andrew Brown. London: Alma Classics, 2013.

Maistre, Xavier de. A Nocturnal Expedition around My Room. Trans. Andrew Brown. London: Alma Classics, 2013.

Mallgrave, Harry Francis. The Architect’s Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Trans. John E. Woods. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

Masheck, Joseph. “Saul Steinberg’s Written Pictures.” Artforum Issue 16 (1978): 26-30.

Matravers, Derek. “Is Boring Art Just Boring?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53, No.4 (Autumn, 1995): 425-426.

Matthews, Stanley. From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007.

McCoubrey, John W. “Three Paintings by Edward Hicks.” Yale Art Gallery Bulletin Vol. 25 No. 2 (Oct., 1959): 16-21.

341

McDonough, Tom, editor. Boredom. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2017.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Mendelsohn, Erich. Amerika. New York: Dover Publications, 1993.

Meyer Spacks, Patricia. Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Meyer, James. Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.

Michelson, Annette. “A World Embodied in the Dancing Line.” October Vol. 96 (Spring, 2001): 3-16.

Miller, William Ian. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. “Images of Our Dilemma.” Progressive Architecture Issue 36 (1955): 218- 224.

Moos, Stanislaus von. Venturi, Rausch & Scott Brown: Buildings and Projects. New York: Rizzoli, 1987.

Mora, Umberto. Conversations with Berenson. Trans. by Florence Hammond. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975 [1965].

Moran, Joe. “Benjamin and Boredom.” 2003

Moravia, Alberto. Boredom. Translated by Angus Davidson. New York: The New York Review of Books, 1999 [1960].

Morris, Eugene J. “Air Rights Are ‘Fertile Soil’.” The Urban Lawyer 1, No. 3 (Fall 1969): 247- 267.

Mumford, Lewis. “The Case against Modern Architecture.” Architectural Record. Vol. 131 (April 1962): 155-162.

342

Narusyte, Agne. The Aesthetics of Boredom: Lithuanian Photography 1980-1990. Vilnius: Vilnius dailes akademijos leidykla, 2010.

Ngai, Sianne. “Merely Interesting.” Critical Inquiry Vol. 34 No. 4 (Summer, 2008): 777-817.

Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Ngai, Sianne; Jasper, Adam. “Our Aesthetics Categories: An Interview with Sianne Ngai.” Cabinet Issue 43 (Fall 2011). On line issue http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/43/jasper_ngai.php

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage Books, 1974.

O’Neil, Edward N. “Cynthia and the Moon.” Classical Philology 53, No. 1 (January 1958): 1-8.

Osborne, Peter. “The Dreambird of Experience: Utopia, Possibility, Boredom.” Radical Philosophy 137 (May / June 2006): 36-44.

Parreno, Christian. “Boredom and Space: Blunting and Jading as Causes of Change in Architecture.” The Journal of Architecture. Oct. 15, 2015.

Pelletier, Louise. Architecture in Words: Theatre, Langauge and the Sensuous Space of Architecture. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.

Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Trans. by John Sturrock. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

Perry, Ralph Barton. General Theory of Value: Its Meanings and Basic Principles Construed in Terms of Interest. New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1926.

Petro, Patrice. “After Shock / Between Boredom and History.” In Patrice Petro ed. Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Peyre, Henri. “Creative boredom and French literature.” Centerpoint, Spring, 1974, pp. 24-32

343

Pezze, Barbara Dell and Carlo Salzani, eds. Essays on Boredom and Modernity. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1994.

Phillips, Adam. On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Phillips, James. “Beckett’s Boredom.” In Pezze and Salzani, Essays on Boredom and Modernity. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1994.

Pieper, Josef. Leisure, the Basis of Culture. New York: Random House, 1963.

Poerksen, Uwe. Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language. Translated by Jutta Mason and David Cayley. University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995 [1988]

Priest, Eldritch. “Listening to Nothing in Particular: Boredom and Contemporary Experimental Music.” Postmodern Culture Vol. 21 Issue 2 (Jan. 2011).

Progressive Architecture. 1960-1970.

Rapoport, Amos and Robert E. Kantor. “Complexity and Ambiguity in Environmental Design.” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 33, No. 4 (1967): 210-221.

Raposa, Michael L. “Art, Religion and Musement.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Vol. 42 No. 4 (Summer, 1984): 427-437.

Raposa, Michael L. “Boredom and the Religious Imagination.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Mar., 1985), pp. 75-91.

Raposa, Michael L. “Habits and Essences.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. Vol. 20 No. 2 (Spring, 1984): 147-167.

Raposa, Michael L. Boredom and the Religious Imagination. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1999.

Reid, Robin T. “The History of the Drive-In Movie Theatre.” Smithsonian Magazine (May 27, 2008). Accessed July 10, 2014.

Rose, Barbara. “ABC Art.” Art in America (October 1965).

344

Rosenberg, Harold. “Saul Steinberg’s Art World.” Art News Issue 65 (1966): 51-68.

Rosenberg, Harold. Discovering the Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture, and Politics. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1973.

Rosenberg, Harold. The Tradition of the New. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1959.

Rosler, Martha. “Travel Stories.” Grey Room No. 6 (Summer 2002): 108-137.

Rowe, Colin and Robert Slutzky. “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal.” Perspecta 8 (1963): 45-54.

Rudofsky, Bernard. Behind the Picture Window. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955.

Rudofsky, Bernard. The Unfashionable Human Body. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company Inc., 1971.

Ruscha, Ed. Every Building on the Sunset Strip. 1966.

Ruscha, Ed. Some Los Angeles Apartments. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Anderson, Ritchie & Simon, 1970.

Ruscha, Ed. Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles. 1967.

Ruscha, Ed. Twentysix Gasoline Stations. 1962.

Ruscha, Ed; Coplans, John. “Concerning Various Small Fires: Edward Ruscha Discusses His Perplexing Publications.” Artforum Issue 5 (1965): 24-25.

Russell, Bertrand. The Conquest of Happiness. New York: Liveright, 1958 [1930].

Rykwert, Joseph. “The Constitution of Bohemia.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics. No. 31. (Spring 1997): 109-127.

Rykwert, Joseph. The Judicious Eye: Architecture against the Other Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Salzani, Carlo. “The Atrophy of Experience: Walter Benjamin and Boredom.” In Essays on Boredom and Modernity. Barbara delle Pezze and Carlo Salzani, editors. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1994. 345

Schilling, Derek. “Everyday Life and the Challenge to History in Postwar France: Braudel, Lefebvre, Certeau,” Diacritics, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring 2003): 23-40.

Schlegel, Friedrich. On the Study of Greek Poetry. Translated by Stuart Barnett. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001.

Schneider, Pierre. “Saul Steinberg.” In Louvre Dialogues. Trans. by Patricia Southgate. New York: Atheneum, 1971.

Schneider, Pierre. “Steinberg at the Louvre.” Art in America Issue 55 (July-Aug., 1967): 82-91.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The world as Will and Representation. Translated by E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dove Publications, 1966.

Schwartz, Alexandra. Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2010.

Schwartz, Hillel. The Culture of the Copy. New York: Zone Books, 1996.

Scott Brown, Denise, Robert Venturi. “On Ducks and Decoration.” Architecture Canada 45 No. 10 (1968): 48-49.

Scott Brown, Denise. “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning.” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35:3 (1969): 184-186.

Scott Brown, Denise. “Teaching Architectural History.” Arts and Architecture 84, No. 5 (May 1967): 29-30.

Scully, Vincent. Modern Architecture and Other Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Shinkle, Eugenie. “Boredom, Repetition, Inertia: Contemporary Photography and the Aesthetics of the Banal.” Mosaic Vol. 37 (4) (2004): 165-184.

Sibyl, Moholy-Nagy. The Architecture of Paul Rudolph. New York: Praeger, 1970.

Sidlauskas, Susan. Body, Place, and Self in Nineteenth-Century Painting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

346

Silver, Daniel Aaron. The Uses of Boredom. Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Chicago, 2008.

Simic, Charles. The New Yorker. December 10, 2007, p.54.

Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited by Kurt H. Wolff (Nabu, 2012).

Simon, Herbert A. “The Architecture of Complexity.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Vol. 106 No. 6 (Dec. 12, 1962): 467-482.

Simon, Herbert A. “The Architecture of Complexity.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106, No. 6. (December 1962): 467-482.

Sisk, John P. “The End of Boredom.” The Georgia Review Vol. 39 No. 1 (Spring, 1985): 25-34.

Skinner, B.F. About Behaviorism. New York: Knopf, 1974.

Sloterdijk, Peter. “The Crystal Palace.” In In the Global Inner Space Capital: For a Philosophical Theory of Globalization. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005: 265-276.

Smith, Joel. Illuminations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Smith, Joel. Steinberg at The New Yorker. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2005.

Sontag, Susan. “A Sontag Sampler.” The New York Times. April 1, 2012.

Sorkin, Michael. “The Theming of the City.” Lotus International. 109 /2001: 6-17.

Stacey, Chris. American Boredom: The Origins of a Way of Life, 1885-1950. Ph.D. Dissertation, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2011.

Stearns, Peter N. 1848: The Revolutionary Tide in Europe. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1974.

Stearns, Peter N. 1848: The Revolutionary Tide in Europe. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1974.

Steinberg at the Smithsonian

347

Steinberg, Leo. “The Eye is a Part of the Mind.” In Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007 [1953].

Steinberg, Saul. “Interview with Saul Steinberg.” Time. Vol. 111. Nr. 16. 4/18/1978.

Steinberg, Saul. “Our False-Front Culture.” Look (Jan. 09, 1968): 46-49.

Steinberg, Saul. “Recapitulation.” Architectural Review Issue 108 (Dec., 1950): 371-376.

Steinberg, Saul. “Steinberg on the City.” Journal of the American Institute of Planners Vol. XXVII No. 3 (Aug., 1961).

Steinberg, Saul. Drawing Into Being. Exhibition Catalog. New York: Pacewildestein, 1999.

Steinberg, Saul. Drawing into Being. New York: Pacewildenstein, 1999.

Steinberg, Saul. Still Life and Architecture. Exhibition Catalog. New York: The Pace Gallery, 1982.

Steinberg, Saul. Still Life and Architecture. New York: The Pace Gallery, 1982.

Steinberg, Saul. The Discovery of America. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1992.

Steinberg, Saul. The Labyrinth. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960.

Steinberg, Saul. The Labyrinth. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960.

Steinberg, Saul. The New World. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966.

Steinberg, Saul. The New World. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975.

Steinberg, Saul. The Passport. Revised Edition. New York: Random House, 1979.

Steinberg, Saul; Gruen, John. Interview with Saul Steinberg. In The Artist Observed: 28 Interviews with Contemporary Artists. Chicago: A Capella Books, 1991.

Stern, Fritz. The politics of cultural despair. Berkeley and LA: University of California Press: 1961. ???

Stoller, Ezra. “Photography and the Language of Cinema.” Perspecta Vol. 8 (1963): 43-44.

348

Stoppani, Teresa. “Dust Projects: On Walter Benjamin Passagen-Werk and Some Contemporary Dusty Makings in Architecture.” The Journal of Architecture. Vol. 12. Nr. 5. May 2008: 543 – 557.

Suhr, Elmer G. “The Sphinx.” Folklore 81, No. 2 (Summer 1970): 97-111.

Sullivan, Louis. Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings. New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947.

Susan Sontag. Against Interpretation. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 1966.

Svendsen, Lars. A Philosophy of Boredom. Translated by John Irons. London: Reaktion Books, 2005.

Sypher, Wylie. Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1955.

Tedeschini Lalli, Mario. “Descent from Paradise: Saul Steinberg’s Italian Years (1933-1941). Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC No. 2 (October, 2011).

Teyssot, Georges. “Boredom and Bedroom: The Suppression of the Habitual,” Assemblage, No. 30 (August 1996): 44-61.

Thiele, Leslie Paul. “Postmodernity and the Routinization of Novelty: Heidegger on Boredom and Technology,” Polity, Vol. 29, No 4 (Summer, 1997), pp. 489-517.

Tillich, Paul. My Search for Absolutes with drawings by Saul Steinberg. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.

Tolles, Frederick B. Quakers and the Atlantic Culture. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1960.

Tolles, Frederick. B. “’Of the Best Sort but Plain:’ The Quaker Esthetic.” American Quarterly Vol. 11 No. 4 (Winter, 1959): 484-502.

Tolles, Frederick. B. “The Primitive Painter as Poet.” Bulletin of Friends Historical Association Vol. 50 No. 1 (Spring, 1961): 12-30.

349

Tomkins, Silvan S. Affect Imagery Consciousness. New York: Springer Publishing Company Inc., 1962.

Toohey, Peter. Boredom: A Lively History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012

Torbett, Rachel June. “The Quick and the Flat: Walter Benjamin, Werner Herzog.” Pezze and Salzani, Essays on Boredom and Modernity. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1994.

Treib, Marc. “Maps of the Mind.” Print Issue 41 (March-April, 1987): 112-117.

Updike, John. “Introduction.” In Saul Steinberg: Fifty Works from the Collection of Silvia and Jeffrey Loria. Jeffrey Loria, 1995.

Upton, Dell. “Architecture in Everyday Life.” New Literary History. Vol. 33 No. 4 (Autumn 2002): 707-723.

Vanel, Herve. “John Cage’s Muzak-Plus: The Fu(rni)ture of Music.” Representations 102, No. 1 (Spring 2008): 94-128.

Vanhaelen, Angela. “Boredom’s Threshold: Dutch Realism.” Art History. Vol. 35 No. 5 (November 2012): 1004-1023.

Venturi, Robert and Denise Scott Brown. Architecture as Signs and Systems: For a Mannerist Time. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 2004.

Venturi, Robert, Bruce Adams, and Denise Scott Brown. “Mass Communication on the People Freeway: Or Piranesi Is Too Easy.” Perspecta 12, (1969): 49-56.

Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown. “A Significance for the A&P Parking Lots or Learning from Las Vegas.” Architectural Forum 128, No. 2 (1968): 36-43.

Venturi, Robert. “3 Projects.” Perspecta 11 (1967): 103-111.

Venturi, Robert. “A Bill-ding-board Involving Movies, Relics, and Space.” Architectural Forum 128 (April 1968): 74-79.

Venturi, Robert. “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: Selections from a Forthcoming Book.” Perspecta 9/10 (1965): 17-56.

350

Venturi, Robert. “Entry for the National Football Hall of Fame Competition.” Architecture Canada 45, No. 10 (October 1968): 50-53.

Venturi, Robert. “From Invention to Convention in Architecture.” RSA Journal 136, No. 5378 (January 1988): 89-103.

Venturi, Robert. “Plain and Fancy Architecture by Cass Gilbert at Oberlin.” Apollo Vol. 130 No. 168 (February, 1976): 86-89.

Venturi, Robert. “Plain and Fancy Architecture by Cass Gilbert at Oberlin.” Allen Memorial Bulletin Vol. 34 No. 2 (1976-1977): 83-104.

Venturi, Robert. “Upbringing among Quakers.” In Cateura, Linda Brandi (ed.). Growing Up Italian. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1997: 195-201.

Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. 2nd edition. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002.

Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966.

Venturi, Robert. Iconography and Electronics Upon a Generic Architecture: A View from the Drafting Room. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996.

Venturi, Robert and Denise Scott Brown. “Is and Ought: Interview with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.” Perspecta 41: 37-41.

Venturi, Robert and Denise Scott Brown. A View from the Campidoglio: Selected Essays 1953- 1984. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1984.

Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1998.

Verplanck, Anne. “The Silhouette and Quaker Identity in Early National Philadelphia.” Winterthur Portfolio Vol. 43 No. 1 (Spring, 2009): 41-78.

Vinegar, Aron. I Am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2008. 351

Violeau, Jean-Louis. “Utopie: In Acts.” In The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in ’68, edited by Marc Dessauce. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.

Vogel, Carol. “Conceptual Inspiration, by the Book.” The New York Times (Feb. 28, 2013).

Watson, John B. “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.” Psychological Review, No. 20 (1913): 158-177.

Watson, John B. Behaviorism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1925.

Weekly, Caroline J. “Edward Hicks: Quaker Artist and Minister.” In Lapsansky, Emma Jones; Verplanck, Anne A. (eds.). Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

Wexman, Virginia. “Pop: The New Architecture.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal Vol.54 No.2 (Summer, 1971): 191-201.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Wilson, Colin. The outsider: an inquiry into the nature of the sickness of mankind in the mid- twentieth century. London: Gollancz, 1956.

Winter, Richard. Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment. InterVarsity Press, 2002.

Wolfe, Tom. “Electro-Graphic Architecture.” Architecture Canada Vol. 45 (Oct. 1968): 42-47.

Wölfflin, Heinrich. Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art. Translated by M.D. Hottinger. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1950 [1st English translation: New York: G. Bell and Sons Ltd., 1932].

Wölfflin, Heinrich. Renaissance and Baroque. Translated by Kathrin Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979 [1964].

352

Wölfflin, Heinrich. The Sense of Form in Art: A Comparative Psychological Study. Translated by A. Muehsam and N. A. Shatan. New York: Chelsea Publishing Company, 1958.

Worringer, Wilhelm. Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style. Translated by Michael Bullock. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1997.

Zumthor, Peter. Atmospheres. Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2006.

353